Paint the Town Red
by Le'letha
Summary: To solve the murder of a young woman, Beckett and Castle take their case into an underworld of Slayers and the supernatural. …Looks like Buffy is visiting the Big Apple after all. COMPLETE
1. Chapter 1: Dead Things

_**Paint the Town Red**_

_**Le'letha**_

**Summary: **To solve the murder of a young woman, Beckett and Castle take their case into an underworld of Slayers and the supernatural. …Looks like Buffy is visiting the Big Apple after all.

**Disclaimer: **I owneth not, rather I owe—debts of gratitude to two good friends, one who introduced me to "Buffy" and one who introduced me to "Castle". Thanks, R.B and S.Y—if I owned them, I'd share with you.

**Author's Note on Continuity: **I am as up-to-date as it is possible to be with "Castle" and will try very hard not to contradict things that have been previously established. As for "Buffy", I have _not_ read the comics, and have been advised not to do so. So everything that happens After Sunnydale is made up by me. But I'm really trying to make it ring true and have had loads of fun inventing and inferring a Slayer 'culture'. This is set in "Castle" mid-Season Three, "Buffy" about four years after Season Seven. The years have been altered and meddled with to make them congruous, so please don't point out to me that they don't match up.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

**Chapter One: Dead Things**

When she came down the stairs on Wednesday morning, Alexis could hear the sounds of her father writing in his study—laptop keys clicking, a piece of the playlist she'd put together last Christmas for him to listen to while he worked, and shapeless mumbles of self-congratulation and self-criticism as he wrote. Not wanting to interrupt him, she surveyed the fruit options available for breakfast. Unfortunately, the orange she grabbed from one of the bowls slipped from her hand and dropped into the sink, causing two sounds—an echoing metallic _thunk_, and a word from the study that Alexis was reasonably sure she was not meant to know.

"Dad?" she called, retrieving the errant orange. "You all right in there?"

"Alexis? Oh." Rick Castle appeared in the open doorway, still dressed in the sweats he'd been wearing when she'd gone to bed the night before, but now with a laptop tucked under one arm. "What was that?"

She waved half a peeled orange at him. "Don't worry, Dad, I'll save you from the terrifying citrus." Through a mouthful of orange, she added, "Unless it's a mutant space orange, in which case I'm sure to become a fruit zombie, infecting the helpless citizens of New York with an overwhelming desire for healthy food."

"Then what would we do with the bacon?" he asked no one in particular.

"Speaking of, how was the monster movie marathon?"

Castle left his laptop on the couch in passing and stole an orange segment from his daughter. "Oh, it was lots of fun. You should have stayed."

"School night, Dad. Remember? Did you get any sleep at all?"

He pulled a sour-orange face. "I may have dozed off at one point—which would explain a lot, actually, because I really don't think the zombie flick I was watching at the time was supposed to have whales in it." A moment's thoughtful pause yielded, "Attack of the zombie whales…has Hollywood done that yet?"

Alexis abandoned the rest of her orange to her father's mooching and tossed away the peel. While she rinsed her sticky hands, she replied, "If they did, I have erased all memory of it in self-defense. Sure you want to be writing after last night? Somehow I don't think your next book needs zombie whales."

"Oh, please, as if my writing could be influenced by outside forces," he scoffed.

"Uh-huh. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't your main character entirely influenced by 'outside forces'? And what about that time you wrote three pages of _Lord of the Rings_ into a Derrick Storm scene after watching "Fellowship of the Ring" every night for a week?"

"You are entirely too clever for your own good," Castle defended. He had rewritten parts of "Fellowship" into his story by accident, and hadn't caught it until two chapters later. Alexis had never let him live it down. "And I can assure you that absolutely no werewolves, ghosts, banshees, or zombies will besiege Nikki Heat in the near future. …Unless they're chemically controlled humans that act like zombies, which might be kind of cool, now that I think of it."

"Check," Alexis reminded him, "just in case." Grabbing her backpack from its resting place in the hallway, she added as she waved goodbye, "But no whales! See you later, Dad!"

"Bye, honey," Castle called after her, carefully controlling the instinct to startle again as the door slammed behind her. All-night horror movie marathons really were much more fun with someone else, even if he had seen some of them before. He eyed his abandoned laptop suspiciously. Maybe he should reread what he'd just written. Somehow, he doubted Beckett would be very amused if Nikki Heat did suddenly end up confronting Frankenstein's monster. His editor wouldn't like it either, but really, Beckett was the more immediate concern.

Extremely immediate, as it happened—when his phone rang, Castle nearly knocked it off the countertop in a frantic snatch. With no one around to notice, he was unaware of the way his face lit up at the sight of the caller ID.

"Good morning, Detective Beckett," he began effusively. "So tell me, what are we going to do today?"

* * *

Beckett had warned him over the phone that she was running a bit late and he would probably get to the crime scene first, but that didn't stop him from scanning the familiar faces of the 12th Precinct cops in hopes of seeing her. True to her word, she hadn't arrived yet, although he did catch sight of Detective Ryan talking to one of the bystanders that always seemed to congregate at and around crime scenes. Maybe the guy was a witness.

Castle would have waved, but he was holding a mug from that one little coffee shop he knew Beckett liked in each hand, and anyway, Ryan and Esposito had told him not to wave at them anymore, because 'seriously, man, we see you'. He caught Ryan's eye and nodded instead, and was rewarded with a gesture directing him up a flight of exterior stairs that were exposed to the street below.

In addition to the crime scene tape being put up all around, sections of movable metal construction fences were scattered like dropped raw spaghetti. They had probably formed a barrier between the street and the abandoned-looking building, before a detachment of homicide cops had moved in and taken over. Rather than packing all of them out of the way at once, they had just been moved whenever necessary in whichever direction seemed most convenient.

After two stories of metal stairs that seemed more rickety by the moment, Castle followed the sound of crime scene cameras to a small room that went beyond Spartan and would have seemed unremarkable, were it not for the body on the floor and the dark and sticky stain surrounding it.

"Morning, Castle," Lanie greeted him without even looking up from her work on and around the corpse.

"Hi," he responded automatically, too busy staring to come up with a more coherent reply. The dead woman lying on the floor with her hands crossed over her chest had been young, white, and petite. Her eyes were still half-open. Based on the sturdy and very serviceable boots, she had probably been dressed casually, but it was hard to tell. She, her clothes, and the floor beneath her were coated in drying blood. Her short, tightly-cropped hair might have been reddish-brown, but then again that might have been the blood in it. On a warmer day, it would have stunk, and the cool air already had a nasty, metallic tang that made Castle want to break out the Tic-Tacs. He wished he'd thought to bring Tic-Tacs for everyone, and resolved to bring several boxes to the very next crime scene to which he was invited.

"So I'm guessing the cause of death was exsanguination?" Castle asked as Lanie gathered another tiny sample from the body. "The splatter pattern's really weird…"

"Give the man a cigar," Lanie snarked. She'd just ruined a nice pair of pants in the puddle of blood surrounding the corpse, and would have appreciated some Tic-Tacs if Castle had thought to bring some. "That's because the pattern's not natural. The wound's too small."

"Wound? Singular, as in one wound? That must be a hell of a hole," he blurted.

The pretty M.E. finally looked up at him, if only to see the expression on his face. "Not exactly," she hedged. "Just hold your horses until Beckett gets here so I don't have to repeat myself; okay, Castle?"

He nodded mutely and tried to stay still, despite wanting to look at everything at once in hopes of having something insightful to say to Beckett when she got there—or at least a joke to make. All he was coming up with was "this is a really empty room". It was. Apart from the body on the floor and the cops coming in and out of the room, it was a vacant space, no larger than his study at home. Old wood floors had soaked up blood, but it wasn't their first stain—the floorboards were pockmarked and corroded with age and wear. Despite the obvious age of the building, or perhaps because of it, the walls were solid. Castle could barely hear the cars outside, and when he rapped his knuckles against the nearest wall he did more damage to his hand than the building.

"Watch it, writer boy," Lanie commented, watching him suck on the abraded knuckles out of the corner of her eye, "there's enough blood on this floor without you putting some on the walls too."

Castle was saved from having to come up with a witty retort by the arrival of one of his three favorite people in the whole entire world, with the other two spots going to his daughter and his mother (some days). Abandoning the body in favor of meeting Kate Beckett in the hallway, he presented her with her coffee as she was pulling on a pair of blue crime scene gloves to replace the far more stylish and comfortable gloves that she'd just taken off. She accepted the coffee mug automatically, without even looking at him, but she wasn't ignoring him—she handed him a pair of blue gloves of his own in trade. Detective Esposito, who was walking with her, eyed the fresh coffee jealously, but said nothing. Castle brought Beckett coffee, and everyone else could go whistle for it. That was the way the world worked, and it was better all around if no one ever said anything about it, ever.

"She was found this morning around 6:45 by one of the city workers who were preparing this place for demolition," Esposito continued his briefing with a nod at Castle, consulting his notepad. "The team finished up two days ago, but the guy—get this—forgot his lunchbox and came back to get it. When he got here, he felt like the place had been 'disturbed', couldn't be more specific as to how. Ryan's talking to him," he added, jabbing a thumb back over his shoulder in the general direction of his partner.

"What brought him up here?" Beckett asked over the top of her coffee mug.

Esposito shrugged. "Figured some homeless guys were squatting, wanted to remind them to clear out before the building came down tomorrow. Last thing the city wants is to find a body in one of their demolition sites."

"Boy, did they ever not get lucky today," Castle chipped in.

"No kidding. At least they found her before the building went down—and the demolition wouldn't have killed her, someone else already did that for 'em. There was no ID found on the body, by the way, so we'll have to wait until we get a hit on Missing Persons or the fingerprint database."

This brought the detectives, both professional and amateur, into the room. Castle had been to some incredibly strange crime scenes with Beckett in the past, so the last thing he expected was for her to be fazed by this one. He was surprised, therefore, when she stopped short and made a small distressed sound.

"Beckett?" he asked, concerned.

"I know her," she said softly, dropping to her knees outside the drying blood pool. "…I liked her. Lanie, what happened to her?"

"So who is she, and how do you know her?" Esposito interrupted before the M.E. could answer her friend.

Beckett waved one hand over the corpse's face as if intending to close the half-open eyes, then remembered herself and pulled back. "Her name is Stephanie, Stephanie Amador. She's a Slayer."

"No way!" Castle yelped, forgetting his partner's distress for a moment. "Sorry. I thought they were just an urban legend! You know, like the crocodiles in the sewers. Wait. Are there crocodiles in the sewers?"

Beckett made that face he knew so well, the one where she rolled her eyes without actually rolling her eyes at all. "I don't know, Castle, I've never seen one, and no, I haven't checked. But if there were, Steph could have taken them on and won. Slayers are very real, there just aren't very many of them. And they're tough—Lanie, what the hell did this to her?"

"Look at this," Lanie said, using a pair of long tweezers to move the corpse's head to one side, exposing the side of the throat. "Despite all the blood, these are the only wounds I can find just by looking at her here. I may find more under her clothes and all the blood once I get her back to the lab, but for the moment, this is it."

Castle stared, and bit down on a million things he wanted to say. The one that got out was, "Is that a _bite_?" It looked like every blood-draining bite in every vampire movie he'd ever seen, including two he'd watched last night, although it may have technically been this morning.

Lanie shook her head. "I don't think so. They're too neat, and the flesh wouldn't have stayed open long enough to drain this much blood out of her."

"But it looks just like a vampire bite!" Castle protested, hearing the edge of a whine creeping into his voice and expecting to be slapped down by Beckett any second now.

"No it doesn't," she contradicted him—but not in the way he'd thought she would. "Those are _messy_."

He gaped.

"Close your mouth, Castle." She hadn't even looked away from the body.

"But—"

"What I want to know is," Beckett resumed, "why couldn't she fight off her attacker—whatever or whoever that was? Slayers are incredibly powerful—Steph could have broken through whatever restraints were put on her. Was she unconscious when this happened?"

Using the tweezers she still held, Lanie tapped the top of the dead woman's head. "No head trauma, see? She could have been sedated, but that'll have to wait on lab tests."

"Okay. Anything else this room can tell us?" she asked Castle and Esposito.

"No windows, and the walls are really solid…I observed earlier," Castle said, ignoring Lanie's grin at his expense. "She could have been killed here."

"All the blood's a pretty good indication of that," Beckett agreed. "I don't suppose anyone found the weapon? Any weapon?"

"Nothing," Esposito confirmed. "Apart from the fencing outside, the place was gutted."

Beckett pointed out: "That's odd in itself. Steph always carried some sort of weapon, even if it was just a wooden stake."

"Talk about tools of the trade," Castle muttered.

She applied the Castle Filter that screened all irrelevant comments and ignored him. "Unfortunately a stake is essentially just a sharp stick. In a building scheduled for demolition, we're never going to find one, or rather we'd find too many. All right, Lanie, once CSU is finished here, you can go ahead and take her back to the lab. Esposito, you and Ryan organize the canvass and let me know if there are any potential witnesses."

"You got it," Esposito confirmed.

"Castle, you and I are going back to the Precinct so I can answer all the questions I can just see lining up to be asked. Also, I need to contact the other two, and it's better I do that than someone they don't already know. Besides, I have their numbers."

"The other two?" Castle called after her as she and Esposito headed out to get to work.

* * *

By the time they got back to Beckett's car, Castle had so many questions he was considering writing them down just to keep track of them all. After putting his half-empty coffee mug into the passenger-side cup holder, he started with, "What other two?"

"There are three Slayers that work New York City," Beckett began as she negotiated the car's way out of the crime scene area. "Stephanie seemed to think that most of Manhattan was her jurisdiction. I don't know Leesha and Perrin quite as well, and I'm not sure how they divided their time."

"Three people to cover all of New York City? That's impossible! How do they manage?"

She shrugged as they emerged onto a street and settled into the usual Manhattan morning traffic. "They don't. But Steph once told me that until recently, there only used to be one Slayer at a time in the whole world. When one died, a new one took her place. Something changed a few years ago, but she didn't say exactly what. She did say that no matter how outnumbered they looked, the current state of things was an improvement."

"All I know are rumors," said Castle, contemplating briefly the idea of being the only line of defense for the entire world, "so correct me when I'm wrong. Slayers are all women, right?"

She chuckled briefly. "All of them. They're the ultimate feminists."

He didn't know quite what to make of that statement, so went on with "Stronger and faster than normal humans?"

"Right so far. They also have more endurance, and heal a lot faster than regular humans. Injuries that would put you or me in the hospital they take and keep running, and they'll be back to full strength in a couple of days."

Castle grimaced. "So why haven't they taken over the world yet?"

"They don't want to, as far as I know. And there really aren't very many."

"Okay," he accepted, "but here's the most important question."

"Uh oh."

"Last Halloween? The vampire case? You insisted that you didn't believe in monsters, that everyone involved _had_ to be human! Even the crazy dude who _bit_ me!" Castle exploded. "And, and, with the psychic a couple months ago? Suddenly Kate Beckett, feet-on-the-floor extraordinaire, believes not only in monsters, but in super warrior women who fight them?"

Beckett actually laughed at him. "Calm down, Castle. For your information, one of the first things I did on the vampire case was to _call_ Steph and make sure that they had nothing to do to it and that we had jurisdiction. She said that if our body was really a vampire, it would have turned to dust and we would never have found it in the first place. Look, I don't believe in most of the stuff Slayers do; they actually do believe in magic and fate and all that."

"I like them already," he retorted. She'd passionately denied any belief in extra-human powers during the psychic case, and he just couldn't reconcile that with this Beckett who was a friend to Slayers.

"Yeah, I thought you might. Besides, even if I don't believe in magic like they do, I like Slayers, at least the ones I've met." Beckett grinned at him as they turned into the street that would take them into the 12th Precinct's parking garage. "They have a very practical approach to things they don't like—if it threatens them or theirs, hit it. If that doesn't work, hit it _harder_."

"And they believe in magic. And _you_ like them," he repeated.

"Slayers believe in everything, Castle," Beckett retorted as she parked the car. "…except bullshit. Come on, I have some next-of-kin phone calls to make. We can't do anything until we get in touch with the people who knew what Stephanie was doing recently."

* * *

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. Chapter 2: Home is Where the Heart Stops

**Chapter Two: Home is Where the Heart Stops**

**Author's Note:** Well, I see the hit/review ratio continues to stink…but I'm guilty of that myself. Anyway, rather than jumping around between casts, I intend to write this just like a _Castle_ episode in tone and format…but in a New York City with Slayers in. However, you may notice that I will be blatantly stealing chapter titles from both shows on alternate weeks. And yes, it is true that this crossover requires Nathan Fillion to be in two places at once. I Have a Plan to explain that. …In a later chapter.

**Unconnected:** My brother points out that 'home is where the heart stops' also counts as a reference to Joss Whedon's 'other musical', _Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog_, wherein Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer sings a cringe-worthy musical number featuring the line, "home is where the heart is…so your real home's in your chest". …Look, if you haven't seen it, I can't explain.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

Captain Montgomery hailed Castle and Beckett the moment they walked out of the elevator, and he did not sound happy.

"Beckett! Tell me there's nothing to the reports from your crime scene this morning!"

"Which reports, sir," she asked reasonably, "the ones that say she was drained of, then soaked in blood; or that she was a Slayer and I knew and liked her?"

Castle ducked behind his partner as she stopped to talk to her boss, meaning to begin getting the murderboard set up. There wasn't much to put on there so far, which meant he could continue to listen in without standing around just staring.

Montgomery scowled. "Damn it. I never know how to deal with those girls; they can't honestly expect me to believe half the crap they bring up!"

"Well, you may not have to," Beckett reassured him. "I'll do it. I know the other two already, and they're much more likely to talk to someone they've met before. Besides, I'm used to filtering out useful ideas from nonsense."

Pausing in the middle of writing _Stephanie_ under "Victim", Castle was pretty sure he'd just been insulted in some way.

"In fact, I was just about to call them—our normal sources of information probably won't tell us very much about what our victim was into and why she was killed."

Castle couldn't resist interrupting at this point. This was a page of the police playbook he had never seen before, and wanted to find out all he could. "What do you do if you talk to her friends and they do say she was killed by some creature from the black lagoon? Do you have to go out and arrest it? because if you do, I call not it."

"Officially, the NYPD does _not_ acknowledge the existence of 'creatures from the black lagoon', Castle," Montgomery replied. "But we do get a certain amount of cases that don't seem to lead anywhere realistic. Probably some of them are hoaxes, but we're not going to investigate crimes blamed on ghosts and goblins."

Beckett took over the explanation. "We'll treat it as a normal case—follow up whatever leads we can find. If they pan out, so much the better. If they don't, it goes cold and is filed away as unsolved."

"Like an X-File," Castle said happily, considering whistling the theme tune at her again.

Beckett opened her mouth to say something, and then reconsidered. "…_Something_ like, I suppose, and don't you dare whistle that music at me again, Castle. Those sorts of files tend never to be closed—at least, not by us."

Castle began to see where this was going. "But by the Slayers?"

"If they do resolve anything, they don't tell us about it, even if there is a human victim involved. They don't talk to cops a whole lot, probably because they're largely viewed as fakes at best, and insane at worst." Montgomery nodded significantly at Castle and went back into his office. "One of them might come looking for information from the police, but she'd have to be desperate. The ones I know have teams of other people who actually believe in what they do working for them. Is this all we've got on the board so far?"

Castle surveyed his work. It was discouragingly empty, but he knew better than to think that this was all they knew. Ryan and Esposito would add information when they got in. At the moment, though, they had no time of death, no last known location, no lists of known associates or friends and family. He had written the dead woman's name, Stephanie Amador, top and center, and added the time the body was found (6:45 AM Wednesday) to the timeline template. He'd also assumed _death from blood loss_, although he'd added a _(?)_ just in case Lanie came up with something different.

"According to Esposito, the demolition team left the building at 6:15 yesterday evening," Beckett added to the board, consulting her notes.

"The whole building was just left sitting open and empty for over twelve hours? That sounds like an accident waiting to happen—or a really awesome rave, depending on who was involved."

"Definitely no rave there last night, Castle," she contradicted him, but she was smiling, if only slightly. "There were fences up, but that wouldn't stop anyone really determined. If there was a night watchman or someone on patrol, Ryan and Esposito will find them."

Beckett created a heading for _Known Associates_ on the murderboard, and immediately added _Alicia Williams_ and, after a minute's thought, _Perrin Rodanthe_. She re-capped then fiddled with the dry-erase marker, twirling it back and forth in her hand. "I'm stalling," she admitted. "I hate this part. Leesha and Perrin aren't exactly next-of-kin, not being related, but it's always hard, having to call someone up on the phone and tell them someone they cared about was killed." Finally, she put the marker down. "Worse still, they're probably still asleep. What a horrible way to begin a morning."

"How do you know?" Castle couldn't help asking. "That you'll wake them up, I mean."

Beckett almost laughed. "Slayers spend their nights running around town hunting monsters, Castle. When you're getting into fights until the sun comes up, seven-thirty in the morning is _not_ your friend. I imagine it's like working the night shift on patrol—your first meal of the day is at lunch time."

* * *

Detectives Ryan and Esposito traipsed in while Beckett was on the phone with the aforementioned Leesha, whom Castle felt safe in assuming was the _A-_licia listed under known associates. They wheeled their chairs over from their desks and waited for her to hang up so they could pool their information. While they waited, Castle couldn't resist the opportunities to quiz his buddies on this whole new realm of policing in New York City.

"So, did you two know about this? Monsters, demons, warrior women called Slayers?"

"Started hearing rumors a couple years back," Esposito shrugged, "didn't believe in them. Sounded like a hoax to me—just another level to the stories about alligators in the sewers and haunted houses, cavemen in New Jersey, you know the type. One time, I caught a case where this woman tried to persuade me that a poltergeist had pushed her husband down three flights of stairs at their apartment; broke his neck, among other things."

"Seriously?" Castle asked automatically. He liked a good story as much as—more than—anyone, but some things even he wasn't willing to believe in.

"Not a chance. Guy had been hit with a hammer and shoved. We found bruises all over the body, and I do mean _all_—she must've followed him down those stairs and kicked him every time he stopped."

Everyone winced.

"Dude, I can't believe _Beckett_ believes in them," Ryan pointed out.

Castle agreed wholeheartedly. "I know! Usually that's me…hey, does this mean I have to be the rational one now?"

Beckett, still on the phone, couldn't respond. She settled for aiming a healthy kick at his foot and, while Castle grimaced pathetically at her, ended her conversation with, "Okay, thanks Leesha. I'll see you then," and hung up.

"Leesha is going to call Perrin, Stephanie's circle of friends, and anyone else she thinks might know anything about what Steph was doing recently. Word will get around, but unfortunately anyone involved in Steph's business will talk to the people who work in her world, not in ours. We know this is our case, but her friends and associates probably won't agree with us," she explained to the guys on her team. "They're also coming in around noon to formally identify the body, so we need to get as much information as possible while they're here. What do we know already?"

Ryan flipped open his notepad. "Construction worker who found the body said there was a guy assigned to check the building around midnight—I called him, he said he chased out a bunch of kids packing enough beer to fill a cab. His story checks—CSU found one of the empties."

"Am I missing something, or is Tuesday night an odd time to go out with your friends for some illegal boozing?" Castle wondered aloud.

"Not every student cares as much about their grades as Alexis, Castle. Send it down to the lab," Beckett said, "see if they can get some prints off of it—it was cold last night, but maybe someone took off their gloves to pop a cap off. The more witnesses, the better."

"Already did. The watchman didn't notice anything else, at least not that he remembers; walked around the building, opened doors, looked in rooms, lot of nothing. He left the lot around 1 AM, never came back."

Beckett added _watchman arrives_ at 12 AM on their timeline, and _watchman leaves_ at 1. "Any security cameras, traffic cams?"

"Patrols turned up nothing so far," Ryan shrugged.

"Did anyone find a phone or a wallet on her at the scene?"

"Neither," said Esposito. "But if I was going to rob someone, I would not pour blood all over her. Way too creepy for a robbery."

"And you wouldn't mug a Slayer, either," Beckett agreed. "Besides, no one carries valuables with them when they're out looking for a fight."

"Except Castle," Ryan interrupted. "That phone must have cost more than my laptop."

"I don't go looking for fights!"

"And that's because you have a sucky laptop, bro."

"_In the meantime_, Leesha gave me the address of Steph's apartment," —Beckett tore off a sticky note and waved it at them in illustration— "and permission to enter and search it, so until Lanie has some medical evidence or Leesha and Perrin get here, that is where I am going to be. While we're gone, why don't you two run the usual phone and financial checks, see what she was up to in the real world. What about keys—did anyone find her keys?"

"Those we did find," Esposito confirmed, "—they were in the pocket of her jeans. Probably ended up in the morgue with her body."

"Good, that saves me having to convince a super that his tenant's actually dead and we have permission from next-of-kin to search. Come on, Castle."

* * *

One call down to the morgue later, they quickly learned it wasn't going to be quite that easy.

"_Don't you two come down here yet, I am not ready for you,"_ Lanie scolded Beckett the minute she answered the morgue phone.

"I'm just looking for her keys, Lanie," Beckett assured her friend. "Esposito said they were found in her pocket?"

"_Can't have 'em, girl, sorry."_

"Why not?"

"'_Cause CSU wants to fingerprint them—even though they are _coated_ in blood, and that ruins fingerprints. I can tell you already I'm not going to get many good prints off her."_

Annoyed, Beckett tightened her grip on her desk phone. "Well, how long are they going to be? I need that key, Lanie; don't make me have to bust down another door."

Castle leaned into her field of view and actually waved. "Why not take an imprint and get it copied? Your average hardware store can do it in three minutes or less."

"Hold on a minute, Lanie." She put her hand over the receiver. "Actually, that's not a bad idea, Castle, but I don't know if we have the right tools here."

"I'll ask." He paused, and then broke into a manic grin. "Hold the phone." Castle bounced out of his usual chair, missing her eye-rolling grin in his hurry to recruit Ryan and Esposito's help.

"All right, Lanie, now we only need to borrow the key for a few seconds. Think CSU can spare it for that long?"

"_Well, only if you hurry. Practice must be good for them; they're getting faster at processing the actual crime scene. They'll be down here pretty soon."_

Castle emerged from an adjoining room and flashed a thumbs-up at her with the hand that wasn't holding a small box of key-copying wax. She nodded at him, said "See you in a minute" to Lanie, and snatched the address-bearing dead-body Post-it note—a Christmas gift from Castle—from her desk. She also made sure to grab some keys of her own, without which they wouldn't get very far from the Precinct at all.

* * *

The college kid behind the key-cutting counter at an en-route hardware store didn't even ask why they didn't have the original key, making them up three copies which Beckett insisted on paying for even though Castle thought they should be free to police detectives investigating a murder. Despite this, he somehow contrived to be the one actually paying for the copies. He'd once thrown away a hundred thousand dollars on the off chance it would help solve her mother's murder—seven dollars and change for a couple of keys was nothing.

So in no time at all they were stepping into the apartment of a newly dead woman.

"Anyone here?" Beckett called out as they entered, pulling on gloves again. "NYPD!"

There was no answer, and Castle couldn't help but wonder if she'd expected one. "Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend?"

"Not that I know of," she explained, "but then I hadn't seen her recently. My world and hers don't overlap too often. It's more likely that one of her friends might be here."

Looking around the room, Castle couldn't see any blood or broken furniture that would be evidence of a struggle, and the only disarray appeared to be that of a chronically disorganized person. A stack of clean clothes rested on one end of a worn couch and a dirt-stained T-shirt rested on the kitchenette countertop; a damp patch that had probably been stain remover was drying slowly. Dishes waited in the sink. He noticed the TV remote to a small set weighing down a stack of take-out menus.

"Here's her phone," Beckett called out from the bedroom. When he looked around the corner she was putting it into an evidence bag. "And her wallet." That was bagged too. "She's got a laptop in here."

Castle was going to go look over her shoulder at the laptop, but was distracted by a closet he'd just opened. "Wow!" he said involuntarily, picking up the first thing that came to hand. "Is this even legal?"

Knowing her partner's habit of _touching things_, that got Beckett's attention really quickly. When she joined him in the living room, he was holding a crossbow; she was relieved to see that it wasn't loaded.

"Unbelievably so," she replied.

Several sets of matching arrows were in the closet as well, along with a veritable arsenal of handheld weaponry. "Look at this!" Castle said excitedly. "Crossbows, knives—is that a sword?" It was—a Japanese _wakizashi_, about half the length of a traditional samurai _katana_. "Look, wooden stakes and crosses. When the zombie apocalypse happens, I am hanging out with these people." He picked up a glass bottle labeled 'Holy Water'. "I wonder if this actually works on anything."

"Sorry, Castle, your guess is as good as mine."

"But looking at all this, you know what I see?"

"Enlighten me." Beckett wanted to get back to the laptop.

"I see lots of medieval-style weaponry, but no guns. Seems inefficient somehow."

"Crossbows are legal. Guns generally aren't, at least without attracting more attention than a Slayer wants to. Put it back," Beckett added over her shoulder.

"Oh." Castle replaced the _wakizashi_. "Still seems inefficient."

"Well," she called back from the other room, "you can ask Leesha and Perrin about it later. Right now, I'm more interested in this."

"What have you found?"

Beckett directed his attention to a board with Post-it notes thumb-tacked all over it. "These look like reminders Steph wrote to herself. Look here—'electric', 'Central Park carousel', '5 PM class'."

"'Electric' is probably not relevant," Castle guessed, "but maybe her friends can explain what some of the others mean. I wonder why she didn't keep this stuff on her phone."

Beckett was still reading, but she pulled the evidence bag containing the phone in question out of her pocket and waved it at him. "Not fancy enough, see?" It was a cheap burner phone that might be able to send text messages, but probably not pictures. "'Archery range', 'call Buffy'—who's that?" She paused for a moment. "And why do I feel like I've heard that name before? 'Jeffries' Bar'—we might be able to find that…Let's hang on to these, show them to anyone willing to talk to us."

Castle began pulling slips of paper off the bulletin board and dropping them into the evidence bag Beckett handed to him. "What about the laptop?"

"Password-protected. I'll have the tech guys look at it back at the Precinct." Just then, her phone buzzed a text-message alert. "Lanie's finished her autopsy," she read off the screen. "She's waiting for us."

* * *

"_Tell_ me she was bitten by a vampire," Castle greeted the M.E. as they entered the morgue.

Lanie glanced around for unwelcome listeners, leaned over the covered body on the autopsy table, and beckoned furtively to him. He bowed to her petite level eagerly.

"She _wasn't_ bitten," Lanie snapped at full volume, making the NYPD's one and only volunteer homicide detective jump backwards. She exchanged a wryly amused look with Beckett. "Not by a vampire, not by anyone. She's got old scratches, scrapes, and bruises, and a few scars that would have been noticeable in bikini season, but they're not what killed her. I'm officially putting time of death, by the way, at between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM." Drawing back the sheet that covered the young woman's body, she directed their combined attention to the two wounds in her throat that Castle had noticed earlier. "These are _not_ bite marks. In fact, only one of them was made before she died and is actually the fatal wound. The other was made post-mortem, probably to give it the look of a bite."

"But it's so small," Castle objected. "How can you bleed to death from that—and how can it end up all over you?" In fact, he noticed, all the blood had been washed off, revealing just another expanse of death-pale skin.

"I found traces of a type of medical plastic in the original wound. Based on what I saw at the crime scene and what I found here, I think she was drained of blood through a length of surgical tubing into a container of some sort."

"Just like donating at the blood bank—except our killer didn't stop," Beckett mused.

"Exactly. And since it was tapping directly into her carotid artery, her own heartbeat would have been strong enough to bleed her to death, especially if she was awake and frightened—faster heart rate. I tested blood type of the blood found on her—it's a match to hers. Based on the unusual splatter pattern, and the large amounts of blood found on her, I think whoever did this to her probably dumped the extracted blood over her after she was dead."

Castle pulled a disgusted face, but Beckett had more unanswered questions. "Lanie, what I don't understand is how anyone could overpower her enough to do this—or anything—to her. You have _no_ idea how strong these women are. I mean, if _I_ knew someone was going to do this to me, I'd fight, anyone would…Steph was fully capable of putting a man twice her size through a wall—and then taking out three more like him. And what about fingerprints? You can't do something like this to someone without touching them."

Lanie picked up a bloodless hand, pointing at abrasions in the wrist. "She was restrained, tied with common rope. There were some fibers left in the wounds, which I have sent to the lab, but I don't think you two are gonna get this guy on the rope he used. Or on fingerprints, because blood blots out prints as well as bleach, and you don't need me to remind you about how much of that there was on her. What's more interesting is that I found some very unusual chemicals in her blood when I analyzed it."

"Chemicals?" Beckett and Castle chorused, making Lanie grin.

"So _cute_…" she muttered. "If you're thinking street drugs, you couldn't be more wrong. It's called tizanadine, and is a muscle relaxant. Not only that, but it gets involved in adrenaline production. It's not supposed to interfere, but that's in normal humans. I don't know what it would do to someone like her, so a high enough dose could have reduced Supergirl here to human levels."

"Was she injected with it?" Beckett asked.

"I couldn't find a puncture wound, so I don't think so. When it's prescribed, it comes in capsules, so she could have been drugged without even knowing it if someone put it in her food."

Beckett stopped to look at the dead young woman's face. "This was planned," she said softly. "Someone hated her, and thought about how to hurt her most. She was crippled—humiliated. Brought down to our level and then killed there."

Luckily, at this point her phone rang. "Sorry," she muttered, and stepped away to take the call. A moment later, she was back. "That was Ryan," Beckett reported. "Leesha and Perrin are upstairs waiting to talk to us. …They're pretty upset, so we'd better get up there before they break something."

* * *

**Author's Note:** To misquote: I do medical research now. …Medical research is actually not cool. And you know what my medical research gave me? "Helpless" from Season Three of "Buffy". Apparently searching the exact keywords used to describe the anti-Slayer drug used in that episode will give me…surprise! The episode. But the drug I came up with when I expanded my search and changed up my keywords is 100% real. Let's just say that pharmacology is not my field and search engines are my friend.

**Next Chapter:** Castle finally gets to meet a live Slayer. Cop talk meets Slayer slang and much clarification is requested.


	3. Chapter 3: The Weight of the World

**Chapter Three: The Weight of the World**

**Author's Note:** Hmmm…I decided to change the perspective after I'd written three dialogue-heavy pages. That this chapter is finished by now is a minor miracle. Also, I have to keep checking that I'm not writing in present tense, which I am prone to doing. I must have gone back and rewritten sentences a dozen times. On a personal note: moving sucks. But I like my new apartment so far, and as you're reading this, I have obviously gotten my Internet connection working. More importantly, hopefully some of these story alert notifications I keep getting will start to turn into review alerts.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

Leesha Williams didn't like being surrounded by people she didn't know, making New York City probably not a great place for her to live and work. She especially didn't like being surrounded by routinely armed people that she didn't know, which made Manhattan's 12th Precinct not a great place for her to be under any circumstances, especially the murder of a friend. But she'd grown up in New York, had volunteered to come back here when she'd gotten everything she felt she could out of Stockbridge, and really wanted to do some damage to whatever had killed her friend Steph. And even though she had left her usual complement of weapons at home out of courtesy to Detective Beckett, who had called her earlier in the day, she was confident in her own physical strength to deal with any unforeseen threat from the humans around her.

_It would have been easier if we had found her,_ Leesha couldn't help but think, losing the internal battle to not pace back and forth along the corridor. _We could have handled this ourselves._

Leaning against the wall holding a mug of precinct coffee, Perrin eyed the smaller Slayer's movements. Leesha glared back. Despite the many things they had in common, the two did not get along terribly well, and although they exchanged information fairly often, they did not often work together. They had both been more likely to turn to Steph if they needed backup. If she were to admit it to herself, Leesha would have to say that she was slightly intimidated by the taller woman. Perrin was tall and elegant, with long black hair that she habitually wore in a ponytail. She seemed to always be dressed nicely, even when anticipating a knock-down, drag-out fight. Currently, she was also wearing unnecessary sunglasses perched on her head, despite the fact that they were indoors and it was overcast outside.

Next to her, Leesha always felt small and mousy, a feeling overwhelmingly familiar from the years before she had suddenly woken up with the exceptional strength and endurance of a Slayer. A year and a half learning and training at Stockbridge had not significantly altered her appearance as it improved her combat skills and self-assuredness, and most days she was comfortable with her adolescent ensemble of comfortable sweaters and Converse sneakers. Power and experience had given her confidence, but Leesha still felt off-balance in situations outside her usual routine—or as routine as a Slayer's life ever got.

On the turnaround from one lap of pacing, she caught sight of a familiar face emerging from the elevator, a taller man following at her heels. The body language between the two seemed familiar, but she couldn't place it off-hand. Kate Beckett she recognized immediately, of course. In the course of one of the detective's cases, Beckett had met all three of the New York Slayers about three years ago, shortly after Leesha herself had returned to New York, and the general consensus among Leesha, Perrin, and Steph had been that the woman could almost have been a Slayer herself.

This was quite a compliment, and they had unconsciously accorded her the respect they would have given one of their own, instead of slightly excluding her in the way they would have treated most standard-model humans—or _mundys_, in a term that had begun to emerge among the Slayers.

After a stop by a desk to pick up some pieces of paper, the detective and her shadow headed towards the mismatched pair. "Is that them?" Leesha overheard Beckett's companion ask rhetorically as they approached. Beckett ignored the question as both Slayers turned to stare directly at her, waiting.

"Hello, Leesha," Beckett said to the smaller Slayer, and "Perrin," to the taller. "Thanks for coming. Can we talk for a few minutes?" She gestured towards the witness room, and entered it herself as they scrutinized it suspiciously. Deciding the space was nonthreatening, both women followed her in and seated themselves on separate ends of the couch. Her companion also accompanied them, drawing attention.

"Introduce us," Leesha asked, eyeing Castle, so Beckett went through formal introductions, which she must have learned from Steph.

"Leesha, Perrin, this is my partner Richard Castle. Did you already meet my Scoobies Ryan and Esposito?"

"Yes, when we came in," Leesha replied as Castle opened his mouth to ask the obvious question and thought better of it. "They said you were learning more about happened to Steph; they are yours?" Habitually, Leesha had tapped her left fist against her breastbone to emphasize _yours_, making it possessive of an object. In dealing with the various creatures that inhabited the nonhuman underworld, and in some ways in dealing with each other, the Slayers were very aware of rank and dominance. Leesha wasn't going to give any status to anyone she didn't know personally.

"Yes, they're mine," Beckett confirmed, but she imitated the Slayer's gesture with her right fist, making them people rather than possessions. Perhaps unaware of Leesha's surprise and slight embarrassment, she turned to Castle to complete the introductions. "Castle, this is Alicia Williams and Perrin Rodanthe."

"Pleased to meet you," Castle replied, "although I wish it had been under better circumstances."

And that was it for formalities. From Steph, Beckett must have learned that Slayers saw death as often as homicide cops, and Steph, at least, had displayed a similar 'shit happens' attitude. Therefore Beckett was going to jump right into what she needed to know rather than spending time on sympathy and comfort. "Normally when we're investigating a murder," Beckett explained to the Slayers, "we look at who the victim has called recently, where they've been, or how much money they've spent, among other things."

"That may not get you very far this time," Perrin pointed out, idly twirling her now empty coffee mug between her hands. "You can ask us your questions, but you need to know that neither of us actually spent a lot of time with Steph—not on a day to day basis. We're in the same business, but we've got a lot of ground to cover. We split the city up when we got here, and we each work our own patch."

Leesha interrupted. "I spoke to Danielle earlier—she's one of Steph's Scoobies. She'll know more about the past few days than anyone else, and she can put you in touch with the rest of Steph's people."

"Thank you, I'll need her number," Beckett said. "But before I call her, I have a few questions for the two of you, and then maybe Castle will have thought of some he would like to ask you."

"Ah," Perrin said. "Mundy?"

Castle shifted as though he was fairly certain he'd just been insulted, but Beckett merely replied, "As are most of us, Perrin." Leesha was impressed—that was a new term among Slayers, so either Beckett had been closer to Steph than they knew or she was a really fast guesser. "Now, when was the last time either of you saw or spoke to Steph?"

Perrin said: "Five—no, six days ago. Thursday. She was tracking a—" She stopped, then resumed, "something that was using the subway tunnels as a hangout. We wandered around down there, watching each other's backs. Neither of us got seriously hurt, although I can't say the same for the—thing—and its buddies."

Beckett wrote on her notepad, _Thursday, something in the subways._

Leesha didn't know anything about this thing in the subways. It must not have been dangerous enough to need all three of them, and clearly they'd taken care of it or she would have been warned about loose ends. Instead, she merely said: "I called her this Monday, just for fun. Offered to set her up with this guy I know, she said no thanks."

"So did she already have a boyfriend?" Castle asked.

At his question, both pairs of eyes shifted to Castle, but the answer was directed to Beckett as the lead on this case. Just like three years ago, both were unconsciously treating her as a Slayer with the same status as their own. "I don't think so. She laughed and said that she was swearing off guys for a while."

Leesha paused, remembering. In fact, she didn't remember Steph ever having a boyfriend—or a girlfriend, either. Although it would seem to a census-taker as if that trait was more common among Slayers than mundys, it was because many Slayers had found it hard to find boyfriends who didn't mind that their girlfriend was stronger than they were. It wasn't unusual for two Slayers working together to fall into some kind of relationship that resembled a romance, but many of those relationships were nonsexual and both participants would go after boys if given the chance. "Mind you," Leesha resumed, "it didn't sound like a very happy laugh, so maybe someone turned her down. It happens more often than you'd think."

"All right; now, I know this seems like a silly question, but one of the things we always ask when investigating a murder is if she had any enemies."

Leesha and Perrin looked at each other and actually laughed aloud. "Detective Beckett, she was a _Slayer_," Leesha reminded her. "_Everything_ was her enemy. When it gets out that one of us is dead, there will be _parties_ thrown, not because of anything specific she'd done, but because she existed."

Castle, at least, clearly wasn't getting it, so she leaned forward in her chair, gesturing as she spoke and being careful to stick to regular English rather than the occasionally nonsensical and always ungrammatical Slayer slang, which was faster and more expressive but left many people confused in the dust. "Let me see if I can explain. There's a world that you probably didn't even know was there—until you wander into it and bleed for that mistake. It's violent and dangerous and utterly amoral, and everything in it considers human beings to be inferior, disposable, and in many cases edible. It's a matter of survival of the fittest, the nastiest, and the strongest; and let me tell you, humans are none of the above."

She ran her fingers through her hair, thinking. "_We_ exist as we are, Perrin and I and the other Slayers out there, to make sure that world doesn't overrun this one, because we like this world. The human world is better. It makes sense. We humans invent things and create things, and find things to do that don't involve violence, pain, and death. That world doesn't. And everything in that world hates us for existing because there's always the chance that one of us is going to bust them up. Which is what we do. Because it's impossible for both worlds to coexist without someone getting hurt, and frankly—better them than us.

"Did she have enemies, Detective Beckett? Yes, she did. But you won't find any of them by looking at what she spent money on or who she called. _We'll_ find them, and then whatever did this to one of us _dies_."

A moment went by while everyone absorbed Leesha's words. Perhaps embarrassed by her own fervor, she rose from her chair and stepped out of the room, muttering something about changing her mind and having some of that coffee after all. As she headed for the break room and expensive-looking coffee machine that Perrin had patronized earlier, she could still hear the conversation from the interview room if she listened—which she did.

"Leesha gets overly poetic at times," Perrin commented, "but she's right. You were asking about _specific_ enemies, though. The problem with that is that Slayers don't hold grudges well. An enemy you leave alive is almost guaranteed to come back to try to kill you again—so we usually don't do that."

There was a pause—Leesha imagined Perrin fiddling with her NYPD-emblazoned coffee mug, probably empty by now. "Some of us believe a sufficiently defeated enemy can be—is your word 'paroled'? Given a second chance as long as they play by _our_ rules."

"That sounds right," she could hear Castle confirm. "Does that actually work?"

"Not often; it's risky to keep something prisoner or release it expecting it to behave. I know of a few cases where it did, and more when the Slayer who'd tried it had to do what she should have done in the first place and take it down. The creatures we deal with aren't very reliable and don't have any love for us. Well, Leesha told you that. But Steph hadn't bound anything—_that_ she would have had to tell us about, in case one of us killed it by mistake."

Leesha rejoined them, fresh coffee in hand. It was nice. She wondered if all police coffee was this good. "Steph wasn't keeping any pets," she interrupted. "She never had before, either, and quite right, too—it's utterly insane." Leesha fervently believed this. To her there was _no_ reason to take in a monster and expect it to work for you. She had gotten into a few fights in the past over this belief. At least two of them she had lost—one to the creature involved, and the other to the Slayer keeping it. She had almost left Stockbridge over that, but she had needed the training.

Beckett clearly had a few more things she wanted to bring up. "You do understand that I have to work on the assumption that a human did this. I can't investigate monsters."

Both Slayers reacted with surprise. "A human?" Perrin blurted, surprised out of her composure. "A _human_ kill a _Slayer_? Impossible."

"Actually," Beckett corrected them, "we found traces of a drug called—" She checked her notes. "—tizanadine in her body. Have either of you ever heard of it?"

Leesha imagined she looked as enraged and offended as Perrin did. They had heard of it. "She was moxied?" Perrin asked. "Dammit! Okay, now I hope it's a human behind this, Detective."

"'Moxied'?" Castle asked before Beckett could ask for clarification on that last statement.

"We call that drug _moxie_," Leesha explained.

"Why?"

"Because 'moxie' means something like bravado, or false courage, and if a Slayer is dosed with that stuff, moxie is all she's got left. There's no way of detecting it until one of us is suddenly in a fight she doesn't have the strength for, and there's no antidote, just time. If you're in the middle of a fight, you don't _have_ that time. Yeah, we know about moxie. Unfortunately, word's gotten out. It's a killer."

"What I meant was," Perrin added, "that if some big bad moxied Steph and killed her, we can probably find it and do some killing of our own. But anything smart enough to do that in the way you told us about means a lot of trouble for us. Most of the things we hunt are stupid, or at least straightforward. They don't do a lot of research, or look things up on the Internet. Most of them don't make plans beyond next week, if that—those that do are more trouble than a whole army of plain fighters. If you find out that a human did this, we can't seek revenge—"

Castle interrupted again. "Why not?"

"Slayers don't kill humans," both of them said in ragged unison. "Ultim blacklist," said Perrin. "Completely forbidden," agreed Leesha in slightly better English.

"But," Perrin resumed, "smart humans are actually not our problem. He or she is all yours. It's worth not getting revenge in exchange for not having to fight some big bad clever enough to moxie one of us."

Beckett nodded. "I understand," she said, and Leesha believed her. "Now, when we searched Steph's apartment, we found a set of sticky notes that she had written to herself. I'd like you both to look at them and see if they make more sense to you than they did to us."

Intrigued, Leesha and Perrin accepted some pages of photocopied sticky notes. "_5 PM class_ probably has something to do with the dojo she worked at downtown," Perrin said immediately. "We do have day jobs, you know."

"Do you remember the name of this dojo?" Beckett asked, but Perrin shook her head. "It'll probably turn up when the boys run her financials," the detective said in an aside to Castle.

Leesha scrutinized her page. "Jeffries' Bar is a demon haunt," she noted. "Steph mentioned it to me a couple of times. If you walk in there you'll get eaten. We'll handle that."

Beckett didn't seem overly happy with that. She was probably planning to track it down and investigate it herself. Leesha was sure of this, because that was what a Slayer would do. One of her Scoobies, Matt, had once said that as far as Slayers were concerned, all 'No Trespassing' signs in the world had the 'No' scratched out.

"One of those notes says _call Buffy_," Castle pointed out. "If she talked to this person any time before she died, maybe we can find out what was bothering her recently."

Beckett added, "I feel like I've heard that name before. Steph mentioned her…maybe in passing?"

The two Slayers trade looks. "Yes, I'm sure she did," Perrin said. "Buffy Summers is…um…sort of in charge?" She made it into a question.

"Slayers don't have leaders," Leesha explained, but Perrin cut over her.

"We don't, but she's the leader we don't have. She's been a Slayer longer than anyone else—" She stopped. "It's hard to explain without getting into ideas that don't translate very well. I could explain, but not without taking you into stories that will just sound like myths to you. Look, I can give you her number; you can call and ask her yourself why Steph called."

"That would be perfect." Beckett handed the taller Slayer a notepad and a pen, and Perrin scribbled, consulting her cell phone's address book.

"She lives in England now, these are overseas numbers," Perrin said as she wrote. Leesha leaned over along the couch to watch, then realized one of them would have to explain the names her colleague had put on the notepad.

As expected, Beckett and Castle looked a little puzzled at the names and numbers, so Leesha stepped in. "Base Camp is a training center of sorts, in a town called Stockbridge. It's not a terribly big place, but it's a hotspot, so it's a good place for girls who are new at this to get some experience dealing with that world." She was vaguely aware that she was piling confusing terms atop of explanations, but that couldn't be helped. Beckett had puzzled out _mundy_; she could probably deal with _hotspot_.

"That's her work number," she clarified. "Anyone who answers there will know who she is, although they may have to put you on hold for a few minutes while they find her. Fort Sunnydale is what most of us call her house. Her family lives there. Call there, maybe no one answers because they're all out, but if someone does answer they'll probably be able to find her."

"What about a direct cell phone number?" Castle asked, looking over Beckett's shoulder.

Both Slayers shook their heads. "Slayers break cell phones a lot," Perrin pointed out. "Younger ones are less likely to, because they grew up with cell phones and they're more careful about it, but there's no way Buffy has a cell phone number that's good for more than a couple of months. Base Camp and Fort Sunnydale are the best places to find her."

"And neither of you know what the phone call might have been about?" Beckett asked. They both denied knowing.

"You really need to talk to her Scoobies," Perrin reminded her, taking the pad back and adding another number labeled _Danielle_. "We spoke to Steph about once a week, maybe once every two weeks. Her Scoobies will have seen her every day—every other day at the least."

They went over the other sticky notes for a few minutes, but both Slayers repeated protestations of ignorance.

Beckett took the pages back and rose to her feet. "Now, you understand that I need you to formally identify the body—just so there's no mistake? I knew her, and I know that it's Steph, but the more official the better."

"Of course, Detective," Perrin said, "and actually, if you didn't want us to see her, we still would have insisted. There are—" She glanced over at Leesha. "—words to say. We'll only need a minute."

A gesture escorted them into the elevator, Castle following behind. As they rode down to the morgue, Beckett asked if Steph had any blood relations. Neither one knew, but the detective didn't seem particularly disappointed. Either she had accepted that Steph's Scoobies would be better sources or she had confidence in her own people to find that particular information.

Leesha wondered, when they entered the morgue, if all such places looked the same. She had visited any number of funeral homes and hospitals in order to keep the newly dead person from ruining the funeral by trying to eat the attendants. She was beginning to believe they had all ordered their furniture from the same warehouse and had all overstocked on white paint and things that smelled like harsh chemicals. Although the smell, she had to admit, could have been worse in so many ways.

She was interested to notice that Detective Beckett greeted the small dark-skinned woman awaiting them as a friend; an observation confirmed when Beckett went through the introduction routine again and addressed Dr. Parrish as "Lanie". Leesha liked her immediately, and was willing to bet that the woman was a lot of fun when she wasn't solemnly waiting for a dead body to be identified by her friends.

"That's her," said Perrin when Lanie drew the white sheet covering the Slayer's body back to reveal her face. "Stephanie Amador." Lanie checked with Beckett, nodded, and began to replace the sheet.

"Wait," said Leesha, reaching out and grabbing the small woman's wrist to stop her. Lanie's eyes went large in surprise, and Leesha hastily checked that she wasn't squeezing too hard and hurting her, which was always a risk and a mistake even experienced Slayers made from time to time. She wasn't, but she let Lanie go anyway.

Beckett intervened before the situation got out of hand—as it were. "We can give you a moment alone if you'd like," she offered.

"No," said Perrin, "you can stay. This is the same thing we'd say at a public funeral, but since we don't know when that will be it's better to say words now."

Leesha looked down at her friend's face and thought about funerals for Slayers she had been to in the past. Slayers always died violently, it was how they all died, but it still hurt. Worse still, because there were more of them now, it seemed like more of them died, although perhaps it was because in the First Age Slayers couldn't attend each other's funerals.

How many times had she heard someone say _yes, but this is the Second Age, and…_ She'd heard it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, every time someone objected to an action or an idea because it had never been done before. Leesha had said it a few times herself. All it meant was _that was then, this is now, get over it_.

That was then, but this is now, and _now_ we do it this way, so these are the words for the dead, when the dead woman was a Slayer.

"Stephanie Amador," Leesha and Perrin said together, calling the dead woman by her name, and then alternated the simple phrases that were the essence of all prayers for the dead.

"Thank you."

"Farewell."

"Go safely."

"Do not come back."

There was a pause, silent and still. Behind them, into that silence, Leesha heard someone spontaneously mutter, "Amen." She couldn't place who it had been.

After another moment, Perrin said, "We should go. Something owes us blood and pain for this, and the sooner the better."

Leesha nodded and turned her back on Steph's body. Words had been said: they were done here.

Beckett and the two Leesha couldn't help but think of as her Scoobies seemed thrown by the simple ceremony the two Slayers had just completed, so they made no objection to them leaving so abruptly.

Accepting cards from Beckett and agreeing to call her if they thought of anything, Leesha and Perrin departed in opposite directions the minute they reached the street outside the Precinct.

Neither put much confidence in Beckett's theory that a human being had killed Steph. Both intended to hit the streets the minute the sun went down that evening. Despite the fact that there were infinitely more Slayers now than there were four years ago, killing one was still an accomplishment. Someone would be bragging. All they'd have to do was start fights until they got the right one. Unlike a police investigation where finding the guilty party was the difficult task, Slayers knew that everything they encountered was guilty of something. If you kept winning your fights, sooner or later you were bound to get the creature you were after.

* * *

"That was _eerie_," Castle said the moment they were back upstairs and heading towards Beckett's desk and the murderboard.

"No argument here…" she agreed absently, mind already back on solving the case in what she'd no doubt term the real world. "Ryan, Esposito, where are we on phones and financials?" She stopped by the murderboard, looking over what the guys had found.

"Most of her phone calls were within Manhattan, to six or seven people at most," Esposito briefed them, gesturing at the "Contacts" subheading he'd added to the board. "There were also a couple of international calls that she'd made last week."

Beckett took the list of numbers he was carrying and compared the international calls with the ones Perrin had written down on her notepad. "I'll call that number back, see if we can find out what she was worried about. Anything else?"

Ryan had looked up the financial information. "She worked days at a gym called Ving Tsun; it's devoted to a type of Chinese martial arts. I called the owner; she didn't remember any problems between Steph and any of the clients. She apparently taught a class four times a week and it was quite popular. Owner was very upset to hear that she'd been murdered, although she seemed more concerned about what it would mean to her gym to lose an instructor to violence."

"That's really not very good publicity for a martial arts gym," Castle agreed.

"There were also small amounts of money sent from overseas, deposited directly in her bank account every month—we're tracking that down, but the payments were pretty much just helping her to make rent. If they're illegal, they're quite literally small change." Ryan consulted his folder of finances. "She'd made several purchases at gun stores and pawn shops that will probably turn out to be the arsenal you and Castle found at her apartment," he continued to Beckett, "but nothing else pops. However, the night she was killed she bought coffee from a place a couple miles from where she was killed. If she was being followed, maybe someone there saw something."

Beckett handed the phone records folder back to Esposito, relieved to be doing something she knew how to do. "All right, you two go check out the gym—see if you can track down the students in her class, anyone she would have worked out with. Castle and I will go to that coffee shop as soon as I've made a phone call."

The guys saluted her mockingly and stopped off at their desks before heading for the elevator, bickering faintly about whose turn it was to drive. As the doors closed, Esposito seemed to be winning. Biting back a grin, Beckett resettled herself at her desk and reached for her phone, glancing over at Castle, who was fidgeting in his chair.

"What?" she asked, knowing he wouldn't sit still and let her do her job until he'd had his say.

"Can I listen in?" he wanted to know.

She considered it, and decided that it couldn't hurt, "But only if you don't say anything. Don't interrupt me—if you've got something to add, don't say it over the phone."

That seemed to be a fair compromise. "Got it," he agreed. "Listening only."

Beckett dialed the number listed under _Fort Sunnydale_ first, which Leesha had suggested was the home phone. As the phone connection made the strange international dial tone, Castle picked up a phone from an adjoining desk and tapped into the line. To show how cooperative he was being, he put one hand over the speaker and only held the receiver to his ear. Noticing, Beckett gave him a nod of approval.

Four repetitions of the international dial tone later, someone finally picked up the phone on the other end, but it was definitely not a Slayer—it was a man's voice.

_"Hello, this is Fort Sunnydale."_ His voice was American rather than British and was wry, amused, as if he expected confusion at the unusual greeting.

"Hello," Beckett replied, "my name is Detective Kate Beckett and I'm with the NYPD. I'm looking for Buffy Summers regarding a Slayer named Stephanie Amador. Who's speaking?"

_"A detective? From New York?"_ She could clearly hear the surprise, but somehow sensed that he was suppressing the urge to add an exclamation of _Cool!_ _"Uh—I'm Xander, Xander Harris. What's happened to Steph—is she all right?"_

This conversation was about to get much less cool. "I'm afraid not, Mr. Harris—she was murdered last night."

He must have taken the phone away for a moment, because the cursing was muffled. In the background, she could hear other voices, probably female. They sounded concerned, and she could just about hear him explaining about Steph to them. More cries of distress echoed faintly as Xander Harris came back to the phone. _"Sorry about that. Do you know what happened to her yet?"_

That was interesting—like Leesha and Perrin, he'd heard the word 'murder' but jumped to the conclusion that it hadn't been a person who'd killed her. Beckett could see Castle's expression, and realized he'd also inferred that Xander Harris had spent a lot of time around Slayers. Although they probably could have guessed that from the fact he seemed to be living in the same house as one.

"Not yet," Beckett replied, "which is why I'm calling for Ms. Summers. When we searched Steph's apartment, we found some notes she had written to herself. One of them was a reminder to call your friend Buffy, and we found phone records that indicated she had called this number last week. I'd like to know what that conversation was about," she explained. "Is she there?"

_"Actually, no,"_ said Xander slowly. _"She left last Friday, and she hasn't called to confirm when she'll be back yet. I'm guessing this is really important?"_

"I believe so."

"_Hold on a moment."_ It sounded as if Xander had one hand over the speaker, much like Castle did, but she could still hear him talking to someone named Willow. When he came back on the phone, he confirmed that _"If you can wait, Willow's calling the cell phone Buffy was using when she left. Hopefully she still has it. What happened to Steph?"_

Beckett wondered, for a moment, how much to tell him, and then decided a little information probably couldn't hurt. "She was poisoned—does the term 'moxied' mean anything to you?"

"_Yes, of course. But that wouldn't have killed her…unless something happened to her while she was disabled."_

"Something did, although we're working on the assumption that it was some_one_."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. _"Detective, if you knew what Steph was and know enough to say 'moxie', you know how unlikely that is, right? Hold on—" _She could hear one of the distant female voices talking in the background, and when Xander spoke again, his tone had gotten grimmer.

"_She's not answering her cell, Detective—probably broken or lost another one. We'll try to track her down, but it might take a few days. We know where she went and why, but there's no guarantee they stayed there."_

"Would you happen to know why Steph called last week?" she asked, clutching at straws.

"_Sorry, Detective—she didn't say anything to me."_ Another pause, most likely while he polled the audience on his side of the connection. _"Or anyone else here. Look, even if we can't track her down, Buffy's supposed to call home once a week when she's traveling, just so we know she's not seriously hurt. When she does, we'll tell her to call you."_

It wasn't a great conclusion to a search for more evidence, but it was clearly the best deal she was going to get. She had to settle for leaving her contact information, but when she hung up the phone they knew no more than they had before the phone call.

"Damn it," Beckett muttered. "That was frustrating."

"Thank god we're going to a coffee shop next, huh?" Castle suggested. "Maybe we'll get some more useful information there."

She was not feeling terribly optimistic. "At this point, Castle, I'd settle for something real. Witnesses. Fingerprints. Surveillance cameras."

"Why, Detective Beckett," Castle teased as he handed over her coat, "I never thought I'd be hearing you look forward to reviewing surveillance footage."

* * *

**Author's Notes/Disclaimer:** I now suspect this story will turn out to be longer than I predicted. Oh well. Now for the notes: Ving Tsun really is a type of Chinese martial arts calibrated to the short, the lightweight, and women. It's been around for about 250 years. Stockbridge is, as far as I know, a fictional English town; in its original context, it really was a center for Weird Stuff Happening. No one will mind if I appropriate it, because I'm willing to bet not one person who reads this will know where I found it. Oh…and the Slayer words for the dead are not mine either. But they were so perfect I had to borrow them. The original author is a cool guy and won't mind.

**Next Chapter:** Clues.

**But Be Warned:** My university classes start next week. Updates may be a little slower depending on how much writing I do between now and then, and how much work my professors assign right off the bat.


	4. Chapter 4: Demons

**Chapter Four: Demons**

**Author's Note:** As I write this paragraph, I am about five minutes after turning off "Chosen". The Fall of Sunnydale music is still playing in my head. I do not want to be writing Beckett and Castle right now. I am torn between wanting to write the Scoobies and knowing that my writing will never live up to Joss Whedon's. (Or I could jump up and down. Don't try and tell me _you_ didn't, off "Chosen".) He writes, among other things, the best arguments. Ever. But hey, if you're reading this, you're a _Buffy_ fan. So you know this already. (Also, I'm so high on adrenaline I'm mistyping about one word in four. That's not good.) This is something like my eighth time watching that last sequence of five episodes. Still amazing.

**On an unrelated note,** how wonderful is the episode title "An Embarrassment of Bitches"? Who came up with _that_, and can I shake their hand?

ON WITH THE SHOW!

At the Ving Tsun martial arts studio where Steph Amador had worked, Ryan and Esposito had found any number of people who recognized her, but frustratingly few who actually knew anything about her life.

"Yeah, I knew her," at least six people in white karate-style outfits had agreed when shown her photo, even though it was the death shot of her corpse, taken in the morgue. However, they all then proceeded to contradict themselves by replying "No", "Not really", or "Sorry" to the detectives' arrays of questions, which had included:

"Did you ever talk to her about her personal life?"

"Did you ever see her outside of this gym?"

"Was there anything unusual about her behavior recently?"

and "Did she ever seem upset or worried?"

By far the most helpful character witness had been the dojo's manager, a fox-faced woman named Anita Parkin, who had hired her in the first place.

"She came here to work out starting, oh, a few years ago," Parkin told Esposito as Ryan played phone tag at the manager's desk, working through the list of 5:30 class students that they'd extracted from Parkin after much persuasion and assurances that they weren't trying to arrest anyone on it. "She'd never trained in the style before, but she was so graceful I noticed her right away—most people who are just learning stumble or look awkward, but Steph…of course, I learned later that she had been trained, just not in a formal school."

"And where was that?" Esposito prompted.

"England, I think Steph said," Parkin replied instantly, "Although I never would have guessed, because you just don't associate little English towns with the combat training she had. My God, she was good—so coordinated, and so strong! I never would have imagined she would be murdered…"

There was apparently no end to the things Mrs. Parkin wouldn't have thought, guessed, or imagined, and they had gone down this road before, so Esposito moved the interview on, beginning to wish that he'd taken the phone calls and gotten Ryan to talk to Steph's former boss. "Mrs. Parkin, I know you already answered this over the phone, but since then have you remembered if Steph ever had any trouble with anyone; a student, a gym member, another employee? Any rivalries or grudges?"

She put her head on one side as she thought. "I want to say 'no', of course, but there were some little things that people didn't like about her. Some things went missing from lockers and for a while it looked like she had taken them, although what she could have wanted with a couple of water bottles and a cheap watch I don't know. And anyway we found the watch, a week later, under one of the mats that had been folded up and pushed to the back of the room. Oh, and she was late for class sometimes and one of the other teachers would have to start her group with warm-ups. At some point she'd roll in and just take over."

Esposito couldn't imagine killing anyone over being late to work now and again, or a missing water bottle. "What about her students?"

"Oh, everyone loved Steph," Parkin suddenly denied fervently. "She was so good at what she did."

"But?" he prodded.

Reluctantly, she admitted, "There was one man, a few months ago now. He had some training in another martial arts school, and he challenged her to a duel after class. His style against hers, that sort of thing. She should have said no! If I had been there when it started I would have forbidden it, but I was on the phone and I only knew about it when I heard the cheering from the workout room."

"What happened?"

"Well," she related anxiously, "I hung up at once—it was my husband calling—and went to see what was going on. There were a lot of people here that day, and they had an audience all round them, calling and laughing and clapping, just like it was going to be a great joke. I remember thinking how unbalanced it seemed—he must have been a foot taller than her, and a good sixty pounds heavier. But, of course, she was stronger than she looked—but she was always careful not to hurt anyone!"

This, to Esposito, sounded like a statement that was going to be contradicted almost immediately, and it was. "He was outclassed and we could all see that—he should have seen that. She did and she backed off after a minute or two of sparring. She gave him the chance to call it a draw, end the bout. He wouldn't take it; just went _at_ her, shouting. And a few moments later there he was on the floor with his wrist broken, howling. Mostly at her—I won't repeat the words he used—but some at the rest of us just for being there and watching."

Now that sounded like a grudge that could fester and turn violent. "Did he threaten her?"

Narrow eyes widened as much as possible. "I suppose he _did._ Said she was unnatural—that she didn't belong on this earth."

Esposito clicked open his pen. "Ma'am, I'm going to need a name, and an address if possible."

* * *

The guys actually came away from the Ving Tsun dojo with three names that bore following up: Brian Walton, the man she'd humiliated in front of an audience of at least twenty-five people three months ago, and two former students, Francis Rester and Tim Dämas. Upon finishing calling the list of her currently enrolled students, Ryan had thought to compare the current list with a month-older one, finding several names that had vanished from the roster. He'd called the discrepancies while Esposito unproductively interviewed more of the downtown dojo's patrons.

Most of them had simply found that their daily schedules conflicted with the class time, but two had said unpleasant things about Steph before Ryan had told them that firstly he was a homicide detective, and secondly he was investigating her homicide. They'd both been so thrown that they hadn't objected (coherently) when Ryan informed them that he would be tracking them down to interview them in more depth later.

"The instructor was a stuck-up bitch," Francis Rester had complained. "She told me I wouldn't get any better if I didn't work at it, even though I was doing the best I could. I don't care what sort of super ninja woman she thought she was, some of us are just human, okay? And you could tell her that for me, but I already did."

The second resentful dropout was a high school senior who had gone to the gym and signed up for classes with his girlfriend. He'd broken up with her two weeks later, but kept attending because it was "kind of fun, you know? And I don't have anything else to do until baseball season starts back up. Anyway, the teacher was kind of cute, but seriously rude. I told her she had nice hair and she totally shut me down. Gave me this utterly creepy death glare. Really freaky. I stopped going 'cause she was ignoring me, wouldn't help me even if I needed it." Ryan had inferred from this that Tim Dämas had tried to hit on Steph and been rejected. As motives went, it was a start. Castle would probably turn it into a story of obsession, lust, betrayal, and violence.

Esposito put in a call to the 12th to get the addresses and any criminal histories of their three new potential suspects, while Ryan checked in with Beckett and Castle to update them on their progress.

* * *

Fifteen minutes before Ryan called, Beckett and Castle were just pulling into the vicinity of a small downtown coffee shop called Krimsonn, where Steph had bought coffee only a few hours before her murder. Neither had ever heard of it before, or seen any other branches around town. It looked like a relatively new, single-location establishment, and was wedged into the bottom floor of an office block along with an array of other small shops selling everything from fabrics to live fish.

At least one of them—or the offices above—must have been doing well, because Beckett had been trying to find a place to park the police-issued car for almost five minutes already. She wasn't having much luck, and was getting frustrated. Castle was trying to distract her by quizzing her about the circumstances in which she had met Steph in the first place, but all he'd succeeded in doing was shifting her irritation from the parking crunch to him.

"I'm a homicide detective, Castle, what do you _think_ I met them over?" she snapped as another parking space that had looked empty from a distance turned out to be half-full of miniature electric car. "I picked up the case of a man who looked like he had been attacked by wild animals. I thought, maybe a pack of stray dogs, in which case Animal Control needed to be on the case, not me."

Castle pointed hopefully at a space that looked empty. When they got closer, it had two motorcycles in it. "So was it dogs?"

"No. Bite pattern was wrong and witnesses saw three or maybe four men—depending on who I asked—who had followed the victim into an alleyway he never walked out of. A couple of other witnesses said he'd gone out there with a girl, but no one ever found her. About a week of dead ends later, I tracked down a man who matched one of the descriptions at a bar. One of my witnesses said he'd seen the guy there before, so I guess it was a hangout."

"You guess? You didn't catch him?" and a moment later, "There! There's a spot!"

The parking space was a few blocks' walk away from Krimsonn, but it was a nice afternoon for walking. As they reoriented themselves from the car to the coffee shop, Beckett continued her story in a better mood.

"It wasn't for lack of running, Castle—chased him all the way down the street. The minute he saw me, he just took off. Anyway, I'm running after my suspect, right, but just as he hits the corner this girl steps out of nowhere and punches him straight off. Knocked him _flying, _right up against the opposite wall."

Castle winced, pausing at a street corner to let traffic go by. "They're really that strong?"

"Definitely. Actually, it might help if you stopped asking that question for a while. Just assume the answer is 'yes' until someone tells you otherwise."

"Oh."

"The minute she showed up, it was like I didn't exist as a threat anymore. One minute he's running away from me—and I'm shouting _stop_ and threatening to shoot—the next this girl's doing her best to beat my suspect black and blue." She paused. "Actually, I didn't really think it was strange until she stabbed him and he disappeared."

"No _way!_" Castle yelped. "You're not messing with me again, are you?"

She wasn't. "Turned to dust, right before my eyes. So as I didn't have the suspect I'd been looking for, I made Steph stop and talk to me instead."

"Made her?"

"Well," Beckett had to admit, "she didn't seem particularly threatened by me either. She explained some of the things she believed in, and told me about what she was, although I never would have believed her if there wasn't a little pile of dust blowing in the wind where my runaway suspect had been. The next day she called me, wanted to meet. She introduced me to Leesha and Perrin, and asked to see the case file on my victim."

Castle loved this story. "And you gave it to them?" he asked incredulously as they approached Krimsonn, weaving their way through the New York crowds.

"The case was going _cold_, Castle, and I didn't give them everything. I let them look at pictures of the suspects. Between the three of them, they agreed that they had 'dusted'—that was their word—two of the faces in the files, and offered to hunt down the others. They also tried to persuade me that I wasn't going to solve that case in a way that would satisfy a court of law."

He held Krimsonn's door open for her, joining a population of seven or eight customers either waiting on or nursing generally oversized plastic cups of coffee. "Did you, in the end?"

"No," she said, a slight edge of resentment slipping into her voice. "Steph called me again a few days later and said now she was _sure_ I wasn't going to find anyone in those files—not in one piece, anyway. Animal Control decided that it was their case after all—I had contacted them before meeting Steph—and that was it for that case. I hated not solving it, but getting to know the Slayers made up for it."

"This is the coolest case ever," Castle muttered as Beckett found an employee to interview, placing it on a pedestal with, at last count, the alien abduction case (that wasn't), the spies (that weren't) case, the vampire case (that wasn't), and the steampunk case (which hadn't actually involved time-travelling shooters of antique bullets, but the steampunk had been amazingly cool). This case actually involved vampire and demons and warrior Slayer women—and Beckett was not only admitting their existence, but allowing them as possible lines of investigation.

This was definitely the coolest case ever, and he was never going to let her forget it.

* * *

The Krimsonn employee Beckett first talked to hadn't been on shift the night before, nor had the second girl who had come over to find out to whom the first girl was talking. They both directed her to their supervisor, who cooperatively looked into their scheduling book and found that two people who had worked last night were scheduled to start another shift in only a few minutes. He then invited them both to have some coffee and a pastry while they waited. After a brief exchange in which neither party wished to impose on the other, Castle and Beckett ended up sitting at a back table with small cups of coffee, splitting a really rather good bear claw between the two of them shred by shred.

Ryan called while they were waiting. "While you're at it," Beckett added once he had told her about the potential suspects, "see if you can find any surveillance videos for her apartment, the dojo, and a coffee shop called Krimsonn." She spelled it for him, and gave him the address. "I can see at least one traffic cam from here, so we might be able to get a sense of where she went after she left."

She paused, listening. "Okay. Getting warrants in this case might be difficult, so make sure that whatever you find is solid."

As she spoke, two men emerged behind the counter and were corralled by the supervisor, who pointed them at Beckett. "Let me know what you come up with," she said hurriedly. "Witnesses just walked in, gotta go."

The two guys, one stocky and dark-skinned and the other a skinny young man with a scraggly beard and mustache, joined Castle and Beckett at their table. She introduced herself and Castle, and got their names. The former was Kevin Goss; the latter, Martin Bulis. Taking note of this, she showed them the death shot of Steph.

"Did either of you see her last night? We have records that say she bought coffee here around 11 PM."

Both reacted strongly. "She's dead?" the darker man exclaimed. "But she was just here last night!" He stopped. "I suppose you said that. Um—yes, she was here. She came in a lot, usually right before closing. I work that shift a lot, so I guess you could say I knew her. Her name's Steph. She was always very friendly."

His friend took the picture from him to look at it more closely. His hands were shaking slightly. "Oh my god," he said softly. "I liked her—Kevin's right, she was a great person to have around. She'd hang around sometimes if there wasn't anyone waiting in line. There usually isn't, that late. What happened to her?"

"We think she was poisoned," Beckett told them, not specifying what kind of poison, and continued, generalizing, with "Someone cut her throat. She bled to death."

"Oh my god," said Bulis again, and "Oh my god." Dropping the picture on the table, he pressed one hand against his mouth. He looked like he was going to be sick.

"Hey," Goss said nervously, "you okay, man?"

Bulis shook his head rapidly, which only made things worse. He pushed back his chair and made a sudden rush for the bathrooms.

As the door swung closed behind him, Goss made his apologies. "Steph was sort of a friend, I guess. We looked forward to seeing her come in—always ordered the same thing, usually spent time chatting with us before heading back out. I think Martin had a bit of a crush on her, come to think of it, but I don't think he ever worked up the nerve to ask her out."

"Headed out where?" Castle asked, wondering how much he knew about Steph.

Goss thought about it, glancing at the photograph still on the table, then away. "I don't know exactly. She made jokes about hunting monsters, but I'm not sure what she meant by that."

"She wasn't joking." Bulis rejoined them, still looking queasy. "I believed her. Sometimes she'd have bruises on her face or arms, sometimes cuts. And you hear stories, you know? People vanishing, being attacked after dark… She had this bag she carried around sometimes. One time I took a look at it while she was in the bathroom—it had a crossbow in it. And I don't think there are any archery clubs that meet at 11 at night."

Beckett put the picture back in her folder. "She was your friend?"

"Uh huh. Sorry about the—you know." He gulped. "She was cute…but tough. That's why I believed her about the monsters."

"That and the crossbow," Castle couldn't help adding.

"Yeah. That too. When she was joking, you knew it—I could always tell, and she wasn't joking then. And this one time? There was a guy that wandered in here, he must have thought it was a liquor store? I think this space—" He gestured at the room. "—used to be one, before Krimsonn. He was doubly pissed: drunk and mad."

"What happened?"

"I remember that," Goss cut in. "It was about a month ago. I tried to tell him we didn't have any booze, but the dude just wasn't buying it. He finally got fed up and took a good swing at me. Man, my jaw hurt for days!"

Bulis took up the story. "I was there too, and a woman who told the manager she won't work night shifts anymore, because of that incident. Steph stepped in and totally threw the guy out on his ass. If she'd done it any harder he would have bounced. He shouted at us for a while from outside until Steph told him to get lost or she'd kick his ass some more, but he kept shouting at her until she actually made for the door like she was going for him. Then he left."

"Did anyone call the cops?" Beckett wanted to know.

Both men shook their heads. "She handled it. And he never came back."

"Do you think you could describe him to a sketch artist? We're looking for people who might have held grudges against Steph."

"I don't know," Goss said tentatively. "It was a month ago, and I've seen a lot of people since then. Besides, I was seeing mostly stars for a while there."

Bulis had been thinking it over while his friend spoke, and he looked up suddenly, inspiration temporarily overwhelming illness on his face. "There's a camera in here, on the registers. When we reported the incident to management the next day, I think they pulled the footage and stored it so it wouldn't be overwritten, just in case he came back and we needed to press charges. It won't have his name, but—would that help?"

"That would be perfect," Beckett agreed. "Who do I need to talk to in order to get that recording?"

Both men pointed at the supervisor who had sent them over to talk to Beckett in the first place. As she got up from her chair to talk to him, one more thing occurred to her. "Just for the record, where were both of you between 1:30 AM and 3:30 AM this morning?"

They exchanged glances. "Well, we locked the doors at 11 PM—that's closing time. We cleaned up until about…11:30…and then I went to the Angelica to see a midnight showing of _Gamer_," said Bulis. "I reserved a ticket, and I picked it up at the register. You can check. I was there until about three."

"_Gamer_'s not that long," Castle pointed out. "I watched that on Netflix just last week." It was also not that good, at least in his opinion, but he refrained from saying so, because if he turned Beckett's interview into a discussion of the pros and cons of modern science fiction, Beckett might twist his ear again.

"I know. I had a giant Slurpee and they were serving breakfast tacos, so I spent some time…um, in the bathroom." He shifted embarrassedly. "Seriously—I don't know where they got those tacos, but they shouldn't go back there. And then I went home."

"And where is that?" Beckett asked. She copied down the address of his apartment building and a phone number and then turned to Goss.

"I just went home. Got back around midnight, stayed in."

"Any witnesses?"

"My girlfriend. Do you need her number too?" She did, and he gave it to her reluctantly along with his address and phone number. "Am I a suspect?"

Beckett gave him a reassuring smile. "We don't have a suspect yet, sir. We're still gathering information."

"And to that end, we should get that film," Castle reminded her.

"I hadn't forgotten, Castle," she scolded him mildly. "Thank you, gentlemen—that will be all for now."

* * *

Back at the 12th Precinct, the grainy, month-old surveillance footage from Krimsonn's had gathered quite an audience.

"Wow," Esposito commented as Steph-on-film blocked a punch from the aggressive drunk, then laughed appreciatively as she frog-marched the unlucky guy out of the frame. "Attagirl!"

"If she'd done that to me, I'd be pretty pissed off too," Ryan agreed. "Especially if I was drunk."

"Dude, you have never been that drunk," Esposito teased him, taking the computer mouse from Castle and using it to wind back the recording. On the screen, the guy waved his arms and mouthed soundlessly. He was pretty smashed, it was true.

"Ugh, is he drooling?" Castle wondered, peering more closely at the footage. "You know, I like a drink with my buddies now and then—" He paused to exchange their trademark not-so-secret handshake with the guys while Beckett rolled her eyes, grinning. "But once you're that far gone, it's not fun anymore, you know?"

"Yeah, I know that now," Ryan agreed. "Wish someone had told me that back in college."

Beckett pinned a frame of the man's face taken from the video onto the murderboard. "All right, we have a face but no name, and three names and addresses with no faces. Where are we with the people from the gym?"

Esposito reported, "Contacted two of them, arranged to interview them both tomorrow. No luck with the third guy, the one whose wrist she broke in a duel."

"Wouldn't it be interesting if they were one and the same?" Castle asked. When the other three gave him confused looks, he added, "Our drunk and your duelist? What if he didn't stumble into that coffee shop by accident? What if he went out, got drunk, and went looking for her? We already know that she was a regular at Krimsonn's; maybe she mentioned it during a class and he knew he could find her there?"

Wheeling his chair over to his desk, Ryan tapped at his keyboard and pulled up a DMV photo of Brian Walton, the man who'd deliberately gotten into a fight with a Slayer. "I dunno, man…" Ryan mused, squinting at the screen and wheeling the chair back. "It might be. He'd have to have put on some weight."

"Woman at the dojo said Walton was maybe sixty pounds heavier than Steph," Esposito recalled.

"Pretty big weight gain, but not impossible. Ryan, see if you can find a more current photograph of Walton," Beckett ordered. Under her breath, she added, "Hopefully we can solve this without having to resort to Slayers adding pictures of demons to the board."

Castle heard, but for once refrained from saying anything.

* * *

By the time the detectives from the 12th had called it a day, the Slayers of New York City and their Scoobies were just starting theirs. Leesha had met with her people after leaving the 12th earlier that day, and had arranged for them to patrol her regular territory while she moved into Steph's usual circles, on the assumption that anyone who knew anything would be local. Remembering that Beckett had found a Post-it note in Steph's apartment referring to Jeffries' Bar, she headed there first.

Jeffries' had probably been a legitimate human establishment early in its existence, but when the city had foreclosed on it and no one had bought it, the building had fallen into disrepair. Nowhere near any of the big Manhattan streets and with surroundings ominously lit and littered with back-alley rubbish, any human that wandered in there was probably not coming out. As far as Leesha knew, no one ever had. She'd been there before, usually with Steph. As it wasn't hooked up to the city's electric services, it existed quite literally off the grid. She didn't want to speculate about the state of the plumbing.

Running her thumb along the rubber grip of the switchblade in her jacket pocket, she stepped through the half-open door quietly and glanced around, trying not to draw attention to herself until she had gotten her bearings. With no electricity, it was dimly lit by an array of candles and smoldering oil lamps. They produced scents never produced by any bath oil company, anywhere, and more smoke than light. Most demons, Leesha knew, had better night sight than any human, even a Slayer. Not for the first time, she resented this.

Only a few seconds after she'd entered, Leesha could already hear a rumbling and feel bodies shifting around her in the gloom. She tensed, threatened, and flicked open the switchblade, but kept it down at her side.

"Get lost, Slayer bitch," something snarled, safely out of view. Leesha shot a look in its general direction, but didn't respond. _Something calls you 'bitch', you're doing things right,_ a voice in the back of her head whispered to her—a memory from Stockbridge. _Be flattered._

More snarls, growls, and movement. As her eyes adjusted, she could pick out battered tables and bar stools, many of them occupied. Feeling a little outnumbered, the little Slayer began to resign herself to trashing the place before she got any information.

"What do _you_ want here?" something else grumbled. From the trouble the unseen speaker was having with some of the sounds, she was willing to bet it wasn't humanoid, and probably had some interesting teeth she didn't want to inspect too closely. "Little far off your turf, aren't 'cha?"

"Steph," Leesha called into the smoke.

All around her, laughter erupted. It was not a sound she particularly wanted to hear, and she gritted her teeth angrily.

"Gonna bust this place up," she announced, which shut the laughter down pretty quickly. "Gonna break lots of heads and burn some stuff. Gonna find out who did this, and kill it and anything else that gets in my way. Or doesn't tell me what I need to know. Your call."

She let that hang in the reeking air, feeling more than seeing bodies shift, and hearing mutters in languages she didn't understand and words she couldn't make out. Leesha was beginning to think she should have brought a bigger knife. Not for the first time, she wished New York was the kind of place where you could get away with carrying a couple of swords around in a golf bag. She knew some places like that.

"Piss off," the darkness said, and "yeah", "yeah", "get out".

Leesha shifted, trying to expose less of her back to things she couldn't see, and instantly regretted the movement, because she'd shown how nervous she was to a most unfriendly crowd. "She was here, not long ago," she snarled back at them. "What did she want? Tell me and I'll go."

She braced herself for the fight she was sure was coming, but was pleasantly surprised.

"Tracking some black-market stuff," something said from relatively close by. Peering through the smoke, she could just about make out the distorted humanoid features of a vampire.

"What kind of stuff?" she asked him.

"Dunno," he shrugged. "Bad stuff—demon summoning crap. Dunno why she wanted it—maybe she got tired of being all noble savior, huh?" His buddies in the darkness burst into more laughter.

"Guy didn't have it, anyway," the vampire added before Leesha could take the few steps needed to punch him out. "Already sold it to some guy."

Well, that was vague—nameless _sister_, Leesha swore silently, calling on the memory of the long-ago First Slayer, who sometimes appeared to Slayers of the Second Age in dreams. She hated vampires. "What guy? And who bought it?"

Apparently she'd gotten all she could out of the creature, because it invited her to do something anatomically difficult and expire painfully over a protracted period of time. Then he and his gang vanished into the back of the bar. She wasn't going to follow them.

Rather than push her luck, Leesha backed up the stairs leading out of the bar and emerged unscathed but unenlightened into the much better-smelling atmosphere of backstreet Dumpsters.

Making her way out of the half-familiar alley, she replaced her tightly gripped switchblade with a cell phone, calling up her Scoobies and putting them to work on the trade in demon-summoning paraphernalia. What the hell had Steph been up to? Was she hunting the supplies or the seller? Or the buyer?

What had gotten her killed?

* * *

**Next Chapter:** Lots of phone calls. Maybe some shouting.


	5. Chapter 5: This Year's Girl

**Chapter Five: This Year's Girl**

**Author's Note:** About the preview for "Castle: The Blue Butterfly", three things: 1: _HA!_ 2: World's. Best. HAT. 3: W-T-F…and how can I get in on it? Hm, guess that's four…

ON WITH THE SHOW!

Castle arrived at the 12th Precinct relatively late the next morning, which was a Thursday and raining. The minute he reached the detectives' bullpen and caught sight of the expression on Detective Beckett's face, however, he considered turning around and standing in the rain instead, where it might be safer and on average better for his health. His lovely muse and partner-in-crime-solving was wearing an expression that, in a lesser woman, heralded the throwing of china dishes at walls and much screaming at anyone nearby. She was clearly not having a great morning.

To make matters worse, Ryan and Esposito were neither at their desks nor, to Castle's hurried perusal of the area, anywhere to be seen. In the moments between taking stock of the situation as he stepped out of the elevator and marshalling his courage to approach Beckett's desk, he wondered if the boys' absence was contributing to Beckett's growing bad mood because she had no one with whom to confer and joke, or if they had vacated to avoid her temper.

Luckily, Castle had adhered to the unwritten Law of Being Late and had come armed, although coffee mugs made for inefficient shields and the paper bag he was carrying contained no effective ammunition. Instead, it was full of breakfast—the person late to a meeting should always bring food as an excuse for his or her lateness. Although he had to admit it was more like brunch by now.

As he eased his frame into his usual observer's chair, Beckett barely spared him a glance out of the corner of her eye as she listened to whoever was on the other end of the telephone connection. He had proffered coffee the moment she so much as acknowledged his presence, and she was not in such an ill temper that she was willing to pass up caffeine that she clearly desperately needed. Sipping the hot but delicious liquid gingerly as she waited for it to cool to a safely drinkable temperature, Beckett attempted to extract herself from a conversation that she clearly didn't want to be having—if 'conversation' was even the word for it. Castle was pretty sure a conversation involved an exchange of ideas—sometimes even complete sentences. He could hear the tone of voice from the phone line even if he couldn't make out any words, and it sounded like his dear Detective was being subjected to a rant.

After listening to several frustrated repetitions of "Yes, Mrs. Morris" and "No, Mrs. Morris", Castle extracted a foil-wrapped breakfast taco from his paper bag o' to-go breakfast, spent a few moments getting a napkin just right, and handed her the unwrapped breakfast snack. Although not a foodstuff generally associated with Manhattan, breakfast tacos were becoming briefly popular in the city for that very reason. Once they became commonplace, of course, the very people who were so eager to introduce them would lose interest and let them fade into obscurity again…until the next resurgence a couple of years later. Castle had gotten these from one of the few delis that had kept the item on their menu since the last fad. They'd spent the time getting the egg-and-cheese-and-bacon confection just right.

The breakfast taco did a lot to lighten Kate Beckett's mood, although not as much as the napkin on which Castle had scribbled _want me to pull the fire alarm? _in an offer to rescue her from the obnoxious woman she'd made the great mistake of calling. It was with great and real regret that she shook her head _no_, because she knew he would if she'd agreed it was necessary. It would have given her an excuse to hang up, though.

"Thank you, Mrs. Morris," she finally lied firmly, "you've been very helpful." Placing the phone back on its rest, she considered putting her head down on her desk and closing her eyes for the rest of the day. This cunning plan was foiled by the fact that the space was occupied by files, desktop computer and keyboard, coffee mug, and the second breakfast taco Castle had just thrust under her nose.

Well, the first one had been good, and she hadn't eaten more than an apple for breakfast over five hours ago. Also, she didn't have the heart to turn it down—and if she did, the boys would eat them all once they got back. She could only hope they'd have more luck than she had.

"Are you alright?" Castle asked, taking a breakfast taco for himself and biting into it. Through a mouthful of egg and cheese, he continued, "Who was that?"

"That," she replied, "was Stephanie's closest living relative, her aunt; a Mrs. Louise Morris of Irving, Texas. After nearly forty minutes on the phone with her and her equally pleasant husband Simon, I can tell you with absolute surety that I would have left them both as soon as possible too."

"Stephanie was a runaway?" Castle's fertile writer's mind instantly started conjuring up shady figures met on the road, desperate struggles to survive, shady characters navigating an unforgiving—

Beckett interrupted his mental construction work, recognizing the look in his eyes and moving to cut it off before it got out of hand. "Not technically. Stephanie was raised by her aunt and uncle after her parents died in a car crash when she was five. After an adolescence that sounded perfectly normal to me but which Mrs. Morris describes as a period of" Her voice took on an incredulous tone. "and I quote 'dissipation and idleness', Stephanie—"

"Ah, sounds like good times," Castle chipped in, staring into the middle distance with a reminiscing smile on his face.

"—packed up and left at the age of nineteen. The last Mrs. Morris heard of her niece, she was 'consorting with devil worshippers, hellbeasts, and witches'. That was actually the last useful comment I got from her. The other twenty minutes were condemnations of Stephanie and her utter conviction that her niece had chosen a life that would inevitably have led her to death and damnation."

Castle couldn't imagine dismissing a child so callously. "That was it?"

Beckett turned a disbelieving gaze on him. "Ten minutes of confusion and thirty of condemnation wasn't _enough_? Next time _you_ can call her."

"No, no," he hastily corrected, "I mean—wasn't she upset to know her niece had been murdered?"

"Not noticeably," Beckett shrugged, finishing off her breakfast taco, balling up the foil wrapping, and sinking it in a nearby trashcan that wasn't the convenient one under her desk. "Actually, she sounded like any number of parents who were disappointed with how their kids turned out. Sometimes we get relatives in here who are just relieved the embarrassment—or in some cases, the fear—is over with. I've got to say, though," she added, grimacing, "most of them don't sound _quite_ so pleased."

"So, no leads from the relatives then?" Castle concluded. "Unless _she_ killed Stephanie in an attempt to remove a relative she finds shameful? And you're giving me that look again."

She was. "That's worse than thin, Castle. Besides, I asked, and Mrs. Morris insisted that she hadn't heard from or seen Stephanie in nearly four years, and hadn't wanted to, either. There's no way she'd know how to drug Steph to weaken her, and she apparently didn't even know Steph was in New York. It took me a few minutes to persuade her I was a detective and that I wasn't trying to sell her something."

"Ah." Thinking it over, Castle took a moment to check out the murderboard. The timeline now read _Steph leaves Krimsonn_ at 11:00 PM. The next entry was _watchman arrives_ at 12 AM, and _watchman leaves_ at 1. In between the two was a notation to check into _teens drinking? Time of death_ spanned 1:30 to 3:30, and then the field was wide open until 6:45 AM Wednesday, which was when her body had been found.

"What about the number Leesha and Perrin gave you?" Castle asked. He remembered that the two Slayers had given Beckett the phone number of one of Steph's close friends, although he couldn't at the moment remember which one of them it had been.

Beckett sighed and wished there was more coffee. "I called her yesterday to get her to come in for an interview. She promised to call me back in an hour. It's now today and not only have I not heard back from her, I've left her a dozen messages. She's not answering her phone anymore."

"Maybe something happened to her. Maybe someone's going after not only Steph, but her friends too. Maybe they all know something the killer can't have getting out. Maybe she killed her friend and she's on the run. Maybe—"

"Castle!" Beckett cut him off. "While you're at it, why don't you include 'maybe she's ignoring me because she's convinced it's a private problem that the group will solve without any interference from outsiders'?"

"That's a big 'maybe'," Castle commented, considering that.

"Yes, but it's the more probable one. I didn't know Steph very well, I realize that, but one of the things I did get to understand is that it's a private world. I suppose when talking about your daily life to strangers gets you laughed at and convinced that you're insane, you learn to just rely on the people around you, people you already trust."

"Sounds lonely."

"Do you think? I think it sounds anything but—if you're surrounded by people you _know_ will be there for you, why would you need to tell strangers about your job? Everyone you need is there with you already."

This philosophical musing was interrupted by the arrival of Ryan and Esposito, who had tracked water halfway across the bullpen floor on their way to greet Castle, report in, and raid the free food. (A brief scrimmage ensued over the distributions of the breakfast tacos with bacon.)

"Well?" Beckett enquired when the guys had settled the ownership of the bacon tacos.

"The guy from the dojo is blowin' in the wind," Esposito reported, munching. "Dropped by his apartment, no one home. Neighbors said he hasn't been home in days."

She grimaced. "We don't have nearly enough for a warrant, but let's put out an APB on him anyway."

"Called it in from the car," he assured her. "Also, Ryan did some checking, and found that more recent picture we wanted."

Ryan swallowed a mouthful hurriedly and added, "It's really close. The guy from the gym and the guy from the coffee shop—if they're not the same dude, they've gotta be related to each other. While we were out, I also got back in contact with the woman from that gym who quit her class because she didn't like Steph, but no dice."

"Alibied out, huh?" Castle asked.

"Emergency room," Ryan told him, and Beckett and Castle groaned. "Cut into her hand with a paper slicer at her office, working late. According to one of the nurses, she had a bad allergic reaction to the stuff they used to clean out the cut and she was in hospital for the entirety of our time-of-death."

Castle immediately jumped on this. "Are we sure it was a paper cutter? Maybe she attacked Steph, got cut, and we didn't see the blood for the, well, the blood." That metaphor hadn't worked out quite the way he'd imagined.

"Absolutely sure, bro. Six other people at her office saw her do it. And that was around 9 PM, hours before our vic was attacked."

"Oh." Esposito had a point.

"Anyway," Beckett cut in, "wasn't there another person who quit the class? A student?"

"Yeah, but we haven't been able to re-interview him yet." Ryan shrugged. "Maybe he's in class."

"You mean there's actually a student who turns their phone off while they're at school? Not any teenager I know," Castle said. "Well…maybe Alexis. But I doubt it."

He thought about it some more. "What I'm wondering is, where did our killer get the medical equipment?"

"Medical equipment?" Ryan asked. Beckett, seeing his point, turned to her computer and started a new search while Castle explained.

"Right. She was poisoned, it's true, but the _actual_ murder weapon was whatever sort of surgical tubing you can plug into a major artery and have the heart do all the pumping out for you. I mean, how many PG-rated uses can that have? Maybe if we can find where he or she got it—"

"Nope," Beckett interrupted. "I've got so many results here it looks like every other corner drugstore sells surgical tubing, or something that would work in the same way." He looked despondent. "Still," she consoled him, "if we get a viable suspect, I suppose canvassing drugstores with their photograph could help narrow it down."

"What about the relatives?" Esposito said to her. "Any help there?"

She glared. "Don't ask. No help. For us, or anyone. They were not cooperative, and not at all friendly." Changing the subject, Beckett pulled her cell phone out of her pocket. "Time to try calling the friend—Danielle—again. Maybe she'll answer this time."

* * *

Astonishingly, Danielle Turino did take Beckett's call, and after some time was persuaded to come in and talk to the police—eventually. While they waited for her to show up, most of the afternoon was filled with busywork that felt like it was getting the case nowhere. When she finally did put in an appearance, she was not particularly happy to be there, and made no mystery about it.

"I can't tell you anything that will help you," she led off the moment Beckett entered the interview room, Castle a half-step behind. "Why can't you just leave me alone and let us solve our own problems."

Beckett, however, had no intention of letting her control the interview. "Because it's not your problem anymore," she replied calmly but firmly. "It became my problem the minute she was found in an area I'm responsible for, Miss Turino. And as it happens, she was my friend too."

The brunette glared, not backing down. "No she wasn't," she flatly contradicted. "She never even mentioned you, not to me, not to us. You say that, but it doesn't mean what you think it does."

There was a joke there. Castle wisely refrained from making it.

"Don't you stand there and tell me she meant anything to you! She was _my_ friend, and I would have done _anything_ for her."

"Fine. Then help me solve her murder." As Danielle glared her way through that, gradually backing down, Beckett and Castle sat down across from her.

"How long did you know her?" Castle asked gently.

She turned a lower-wattage version of the glare on him, but her heart was no longer in it. "About three years now. It was just after she moved here. I was dating this guy…he was a real jerk, but that's easy to say now. Back then I was really low—y'know? He was always into stuff, and one time he got too deep into some dangerous stuff with some…" She paused, evaluated him, and flicked her gaze over at Beckett, then back to him, evaluating. Castle tried to look trustworthy and open-minded. Which he considered himself to be anyway, so he stopped trying and just listened.

"People," Danielle settled for. "And no, don't ask me what _kind_ of people, because you won't understand the answer and it doesn't matter anyway. They were the kind of people who don't like not getting something back, let's put it that way. _Bastard_ tried to trade _me_ to them to settle up!"

Danielle gritted her teeth. "_Bastard_," she muttered again. "Steph had only just moved here, but it was a big thing going down. She had been looking for them—she stepped in and kicked _ass_. Saved my life—'cause you bet those creatures weren't going to let me go around the next corner. I owed her, so I help her out."

She gulped. "Helped her out. I—" Incipient grief turned right back into anger. "What do you think you can do, anyway? Whatever did this is something from the underworld, and what, you're going to arrest it? Put it in jail—on trial? _We're_ going to find it and kill it, and the police can't help! Can I go now? I've left everyone else doing research, and I should get back."

"Research on what?" Beckett asked curiously.

"It's research," Danielle said as if this should be obvious. "You have to do research. I mean, you could just walk out there and hack down everything you see, but you're going to get really tired if you try, and then something…kills you…" She trailed off.

"You mean you actually have information and databases on…things?" Castle approximated. "That's cool. I'd love to get a look at that."

Danielle cracked the first smile either of them had seen on her—a small expression, but progress. "You say that, but it's really boring if we're looking for something that isn't online yet—or don't know what we're looking for and just have to look at everything. That's a project—they're working on that."

"You say 'they'," Beckett asked, "but who exactly is 'they'?"

"The Slayers. And anyone else involved with them; it's a big project that's been going on for at least four years, maybe longer. Someone—actually, probably a lot of someones—got tired of tracking down old books in odd languages. The database they're setting up is so much faster, and if the books get destroyed, well, the information survives. Besides, everything else is on computers, and this is the Second Age."

"The what?" Castle asked. This clearly meant something to Danielle that it didn't mean to him.

"Slayers divide time into three sections so far," she explained to him. "The Second Age just means 'the present', starting about four years ago. Saying 'this is the Second Age' can mean anything from 'time to update traditions that don't work anymore' to 'I'm in charge now, get out of my way'. It depends on who's talking and what they mean."

Beckett was stuck in the position of wanting to know more but not knowing how to ask, or even if she would believe what she learned, but she knew she had to step in before Castle and Danielle went off into an in-depth dissection of what the other two time periods were and what it all meant. "Can you tell me what you're researching, in terms that I can use to other people?"

The brunette twisted her fingers together. "And then I can go?"

"Danielle, please."

She shrugged. "Leesha says, maybe smuggling? Of…um, things that shouldn't be in circulation."

The detective waited for her to follow up on that, but nothing more was forthcoming.

"You know where Steph's body was found, right?" Beckett asked tentatively. When she received an affirmative nod, she asked, "Do you know why Steph would be in that area? Had she told you about anything that was worrying her in particular?"

Danielle shook her head no. "Patrolling takes her all over the place. She didn't know all the back corners and hideouts—Manhattan's a big place—but she spent enough time out on the streets to be able to find a lot of them." After a moment's thought, she added, "She was in a bad mood lately, but I thought it was just because some guy called her and she got upset. Hung up on him and stormed off to hit something—which isn't unusual," she hurried to assure them. "Slayers are _fighters_, so what looks like aggression to most of us is just normal for them."

"Who called her?" She pulled out her pad in the hopes that Danielle had a name for them to follow up on.

The girl's face betrayed only uncertainty. "Some guy…" she vacillated. "Steph was really upset—she was all snarling that 'how did he get that number' and she 'never wanted to hear from him again, the old creep'. But she never told me who it was. I can ask…maybe she told someone else. She spent most of last week sulking, but she cheered up over the weekend."

"That was when she made that phone call," Castle muttered to her, and Beckett nodded—as long as Danielle, one of Steph's closest friends, was here, she may as well ask.

"I guess he never called back," Danielle was going on, but she stopped as she sensed their line of questioning had changed. "What?"

"Danielle, we've looked into Steph's phone records, and last weekend she made a couple of overseas calls to Stockbridge, England. There was a note in her apartment reminding her to call someone named Buffy Summers—do you know her?"

"We tried calling back," Castle put in. "She wasn't home, so we really need to find out what they were talking about."

Danielle's eyes had gotten big. "I've heard of her," she explained, "but we've never met. Steph and the others, they tell _stories_ about her, and I have no idea which ones are true. I know that Steph respected her a lot. If they were talking, there's no way it wasn't important. But I'm sorry, Detectives, I didn't know it was so bad Steph had to call for help." Her face crumpled as she heard the words she was saying. "Why didn't she just talk to _me_?"

* * *

Another look at Steph's phone records revealed a number that took on new meaning. Last Monday, Steph had gotten a two-minute call from her aunt and uncle's Texas number.

"He failed to mention _that_," Beckett said grimly. Calling back yielded only an answering machine, and she was forced to leave a curt message and hang up.

"No one in this case wants to answer the phone," Castle joked feebly, and Beckett shot him a cold glare. Holding up his hands in surrender, he presented a peace offering—the lead he'd thought of when Danielle had mentioned smuggling of what he had assumed to be dangerous artifacts. (He had actually thought the phrase dangerous _magical_ artifacts, but had decided not to take that tack with Beckett…just yet.)

"Her financial records included some pawnshops, but didn't say what she bought. Now, we thought weapons because that's what she had in her apartment—the crossbow, by the way? Still very cool. I wonder if I can have one."

"_Castle_," she said, in that tone that was on the edge of being a warning, "if you put a crossbow bolt through the windows of your loft, I am not going to come bail you out of jail—and I'll ask Martha and Alexis not to either."

He made a face at her—that had been his backup plan. "Ah, ah, bear with me, Detective. We assumed weapons, but what if she was buying something else she couldn't get legitimately? What better place to look than a place where people sell all sorts of things, sometimes even things they don't know what they are?"

She liked it. She didn't say so, but he knew the look on her face. "Something that was dangerous… Or maybe something that someone wanted back?"

"So…" Castle wiggled his eyebrows at her. "Shall we make more phone calls, or go check out some pawnshops?"

Beckett reached for her coat as Castle bounced out of his chair and headed for the elevator. Halfway there, they were intercepted by Ryan and Esposito.

"Heads up, guys," Esposito hailed them. "Just got back that print on the beer bottle CSU found in the same building as our crime scene."

"Yeah, after they lost it, and had us digging through file cabinets to find where some idiot had misplaced it for an hour and a half," Ryan complained from behind him, waving the file folder illustratively. Evidently they'd found it.

"Any matches?" she asked them.

"One, and luckily it was already in the system from a drug arrest on a juvenile. Local high school kid, we're just going to go pick him up now. But that's not the best bit," Esposito gloated. "You want to tell them the best bit, bro?"

"Oh no, you tell them. I insist."

Castle turned to Beckett. "While Alphonse and Gaston invite each other to cross the street first all day, shall we just read the file?"

"Sometime today would be good, guys," she grinned, making a snatch for Ryan's file folder. He pulled it out of reach, and, taking the hint, flipped it open.

"Our beer-holding high school senior is not only in the same class as the kid who quit Steph's martial arts class, but they've also been on the same basketball team for two years."

She gestured them all towards the elevator. "Well, that's two good leads. Let's go."

Perhaps they had been making more noise than they thought they had, because Captain Montgomery put his head out of his office and beckoned to them. "Just a moment, you lot. Come over here for a second."

Exchanging glances, they trooped back to and reassembled in the captain's office, shuffling around a bit to fit everyone in.

"Fill me in," Montgomery invited them all.

Beckett started a summary of the case so far, and the guys chipped in and added things whenever they saw something missing. "The last place our victim was seen alive was at a coffee shop called Krimsonn around 11 PM Tuesday night. We've confirmed that she was drugged several hours before she died, with a common prescription drug that weakened her physically. After it took effect, she was drained of blood through what we believe to be surgical tubing that was inserted into her carotid artery."

"Looking at the splatter pattern again, in the pictures from the crime scene," Esposito added, "the blood was probably decanted into some sort of container and poured over her after she was dead."

She resumed, "According to her friends and some of the people who knew her, she had been worried about something during the week before she died. We don't know exactly what that was about yet. Although her aunt and uncle claim they hadn't spoken to her in years, he called Steph last week, which one of her friends confirmed distressed her. She also made some calls to an overseas number, and I'm hoping that the person she called will get in contact with us. Her friends seem to think that whatever that phone call was about was important. We're also looking into the place where she worked."

This was Ryan's cue. "She worked at a downtown gym that taught martial arts. We've found three people who might have had a grudge against her, but one of them alibied out immediately. One of the others is a close match for a guy she threw out of that same coffee shop over a month ago when he hit one of the employees. We've put out an alert on him, but so far nothing's popped. The third is a high school student, who—"

Montgomery held up a hand. "I heard that part…and about the pawn shops Castle wants to check out. What about her friends? How are they involved?"

"Her friends are running their own investigation into matters we have no jurisdiction over and could never present to the D.A." explained Beckett wryly. "They've been less than forthcoming with details about Steph's recent activities."

"Although," interrupted Castle, "that may be only partly because they think they can take care of things without any help from us, and mainly because they think we'll either think they're crazy or won't believe them."

The captain's eyebrows went up. "Well, they're probably right, Castle. Now, you do know you're going to need legal authorization before any store will let you look into their purchase records? Or were you planning just to walk in and ask?"

Beckett checked the time. "Sir, if we have to write up warrants for every store on her financial records before the D.A.'s office closes for the evening…" She thought fast. "We can probably get them written and submitted, but Ryan and Esposito, you'll have to help. Guess your interviewing of that kid will have to wait. As will the pawn shops, Castle," she added as Montgomery waved them back out into the corridor. "There's no way they'll be approved this late in the day. We'll have to go tomorrow morning."

"How can I help now?" Castle asked as they all hurried back to their chairs.

She passed him the printed file. "Read us store names, Castle, and addresses if they're there."

* * *

In the end, both lines of investigation were postponed until the following day. Castle was glad to get home in time for dinner—if only because he was quick enough to stop Martha from putting an abominable amount of peppers in to cook with the chicken—but wished that they'd been able to get somewhere with the shops. He spent the evening wondering about what Steph had found or found out that had so enraged someone they had killed her for it.

Castle couldn't resist the urge to fill his family in on the case so far. "What do you think we'll find?"

"Treasures," Martha declared. "Some stolen piece of artwork or fabulous jewels."

He took the spatula away from her before she could hurt anyone with it, "Mother, you know I'm obliged to ignore any suggestion that contains the word 'fabulous', right?"

"Except when it comes to food," his daughter pointed out.

"This is true," he acknowledged, handing Alexis a plate. "Fabulous food is acceptable."

"Maybe she bought something cursed," the teen speculated. She paused, thinking, and laughed. "Like a Mayan mummy, right Dad?" He swatted at her with the spatula, forcing Martha to take it back. "No, I'm joking," she assured him. "Besides, that just sounds silly."

Her dad shrugged. "Honey, in this case I'm not sure what sounds silly and what doesn't. Her friends keep insisting that Beckett and I just don't understand. It's like they live in an entirely different world."

"Well, how are you supposed to solve anything if no one will talk to you?"

"Beckett is determined to believe that whatever's behind this case is something we can prove objectively, and that our killer is just another sad human being."

"Well, I don't care if whatever killed that poor girl has fangs or if they've got a gun—just don't let the monsters get you, kiddo."

"Good rule for life, Mother."

* * *

On Friday morning, Beckett arrived at her desk fairly early. The warrants for the pawn shops had been delivered to her desk as she had requested, so she left them there and went to make herself a small cup of cappuccino that she could enjoy in private before everyone else came on shift. Most of the overnight staffers had already left, and the only people remaining were an older detective steadily typing up a report at his computer, steadfastly ignoring his surroundings, and a patrolwoman who checked in with Beckett that she wasn't needed before leaving.

She was sure that any minute now the phone was going to ring, but it didn't happen. When the routine was interrupted, it wasn't because of a murder being phoned in.

Finishing her coffee, Beckett headed back out into the bullpen. She stopped short in the doorway, staring at the stranger in the room.

The young woman was clearly not a cop, but she was looking over Beckett's murderboard with the assurance of someone who had every right to be where she was. She stood with her arms folded, hazel eyes surveying the summarized information and the crime scene photos, as well as the lists of witnesses and possible suspects. Her highlighted blond hair reached just past the collar of her long jacket, and one booted foot tapped gently on the floor.

If Beckett didn't know better, the woman's attitude would have seemed as if she belonged, but she wasn't buying it. "Excuse me," the detective said, walking towards the intruder, "I don't want to be rude, but what are you doing up here?"

She turned that gaze on Beckett, not intimidated in the least. "You've been trying to contact me," she said. "You must be Detective Beckett."

"Well, yes, and you are?"

"Buffy Summers. You called my family a couple days ago, looking for me. They told me about Steph. This is interesting." Beckett's confusion must have shown on her face, because she added, "The board. Andrew would love it, but I don't think I'll tell him about it. He'll just want one. Do you always do this?"

"Usually," said Beckett. "I was expecting you just to call back—you didn't have to come all this way."

"Well, I was actually only a night's drive away," the Slayer explained, taking Castle's chair uninvited. "As soon as I talked to Willow yesterday evening, I figured I should be here."

"You've been driving all night?" Beckett asked. To cover her texting _where are you? _to Castle, she offered, "Would you like some coffee?"

"Thanks, I slept in the car," she replied absently. "Leesha and Perrin are the other two here, aren't they? I'll need to go talk to them."

Attempting to regain control of the conversation, Beckett tried to redirect it to the reason they'd contacted her in the first place. "I understand that Steph called you last weekend." Her phone buzzed. Castle had replied, _be there in a moment. I'm in the elevator._

"Yeah, that's right," Buffy confirmed, dragging her attention back to Beckett. "She was very upset."

"So we've heard. Everyone seems to think that her contacting you means there was some sort of emergency." The detective heard the faint _bing!_ of the elevator, heralding Castle's arrival.

"She was going through something she'd never had to handle before," Buffy began to explain. "I had—far too often—so she—"

At this point, she was interrupted by Castle's greeting of "Morning, Beckett!" as he entered with the usual coffee cups in hand.

Now, Beckett might have expected her unexpected guest to be somewhat surprised by his arrival: she hadn't known he was there and Beckett had said nothing about working with a partner. What she did not expect was for the Slayer to jump out of her chair and back away as if she had seen a ghost. Something that looked a lot like a knife had appeared in her right hand, and she raised it defensively across her body, poised to stab or slash.

"You!" the Slayer snarled at Castle, who backed up so quickly he nearly tripped over his own feet and whose attempt to raise his hands in surrender and/or defense were foiled by the coffee mugs. "How the _hell_ are you here? _I killed you!"_

* * *

**Next Chapter:** Explanations for all.

**Author's Note on Plot:** Having set up the mystery, Buffy's arrival at the 12th Precinct means we can now move on to _solving_ it. Expect to see things come together. This is also where we move into realms where my not having read the comics may actually matter, and the adjacent realms of Le'letha Makes Things Up and Prepares to Justify Them.

**Author's Note on Food:** I've just noticed that there seem to be an awful lot of breakfast tacos in this story. My only excuse—I don't even _like_ breakfast tacos—is that I am from Texas, where breakfast tacos are as common as bagels and possibly more so than donuts. If you've never had one, they're made of egg and cheese and generally something else like bacon, ground beef, or potato, wrapped up in a tortilla. They're very portable and very popular here. I have no idea how common they are outside of Texas, but if we can have Indian cuisine and Japanese delis in Texas, I'm sure they can have breakfast tacos in Manhattan.


	6. Chapter 6: Vampire Weekend

**Chapter Six: Vampire Weekend**

**Author's Note:** Yes…yes, I _was_ morally obliged to use this title. You knew I was the minute I said I'd be borrowing titles from the shows. Also, this chapter contains what is possibly one of my favorite lines that I've ever written. I thought of it after I'd already planned the shape of the plot, somewhere around Chapter Two—and spent no little time lying on the floor convulsed with 'ebil, ebil laughter'—but I would have happily written the whole story just so I could have the chance to use it. My brother, who beta-reads this story for me, has described it as 'perfect', which I am writing down here so he will see it when he beta-reads this. (Of course, once I got past that, everything else bogged down. Sorry, everyone who was silently waiting for new chapters.)

ON WITH THE SHOW!

This being his third year at the 12th Precinct working with Beckett and the guys, Castle had already had some terribly and frequently terrifyingly strange things happen to him. He could tell stories about them, even if he wasn't an internationally best-selling writer. But up until this morning, he had never had a young, blond, and better than reasonably cute woman with a knife yell at him that he was:

"—dead, evil, _murderer_!" Among other words he didn't recognize, but was willing to believe were not at all complimentary.

"I _killed_ you!" the stranger shouted at him again, advancing on him with a knife held in a professionally backhanded grip. Although, he noticed right before the panic hit, her eyes were wide and she looked almost as terrified as Castle knew he did.

Beckett joined the din, drawing her gun and moving to defend him. "Drop it!" she commanded, but the voice that had intimidated Russian mobsters and assassins for hire had apparently no effect on the very angry young woman. "Castle," she snapped instead, not taking her glare off the blonde, "back off!"

"What the hell is _he_ doing here?" she snarled at the detective. "Tell me!"

"Put the knife down, Ms. Summers," Beckett said more calmly now that she was no longer directly threatening Castle. "I don't know who you think he is, but I promise you that you're wrong. This is Richard Castle. He's a writer. He works with me."

She—_wait a second_, Castle thought, remembering where he had heard that name as he struggled to breathe normally—took a step backwards. "Nuh uh," she said emphatically, but there was a note of uncertainty in her voice. Also, more importantly as far as Castle was concerned, she lowered the knife slightly.

"My word on it," said Beckett, carefully gauging the other woman's reaction. She was still very, very tense, and watching Castle over the detective's shoulder as if he was going to turn into a monster and eat them all. Which, she realized, the Slayer might be expecting. "I vouch for him."

"I vouch for me too!" Castle said, realizing too late that this might not have been the best course of action and wishing he'd stayed quiet until the tension in the room went down to simply unmanageable. Also, his voice had gone slightly squeaky towards the end of that sentence, which was embarrassing.

Apparently it was also convincing, because the knife vanished again. Paying attention, Beckett noticed the telltale line beneath the other woman's jacket, probably a sheath worn at the small of her back. She returned the gesture by holstering her own weapon.

"All right," she said, hoping to restore order to the room and hopefully get some explanations for what might be the first time in this case. "Nobody here is an enemy of anyone else, okay? And no one needs to get hurt."

Castle, Buffy, and the crowd of incoming detectives that she hadn't even noticed up until now all stared at her, apparently unconvinced.

"Excitement's over, everyone," she ordered, calling up the voice of command again and hoping it would work better on detectives than Slayers. "False alarm." She hoped. "Go back to work."

Everyone made shuffling movements designed to make it look as if they were going obediently back to work, but no one actually moved.

"Oh, for crying out loud," Beckett muttered to herself, rolling her eyes. "If I actually have to say 'nothing to see here, move along', I don't know what's going to happen, but it's _not_ going to be good!"

A couple people actually laughed nervously, and the shuffling was slightly more purposeful this time. People dispersed back into the hallways, although she was under no illusions about them standing around corners listening in. She privately resolved to speak very quietly.

Beckett turned her attention to the blonde Slayer, who was still giving Castle that look. Following it involuntarily, she glanced over her shoulder at Castle, who was staring back in shock that was turning all too quickly to curiosity. She really wanted answers, preferably quickly.

"Buffy," she said calmly, not having to look back at Castle again to see him think _hey!_ "Who do you think this man is?"

The Slayer, Beckett noticed, still had one fist clenched as if to either throw a punch or draw that knife again. "Almost four years ago," she said, not at all calmly, "I fought that man. He called himself Caleb. We called him Preacher, among other things, 'cause that's how he dressed."

Castle had never dressed up as a priest, not even for Halloween. The role just didn't suit him. He decided not to point this out, and also to strike that option off his list of possible costumes for the foreseeable future.

"He was the agent of a thing we called the First. It gave him power, gave him strength. He nearly killed me. He did kill several Potentials—potential Slayers," she amended, paying attention to the brief look of puzzlement on Beckett's face. "He put out my brother's _eye_. And _I killed him_." Something occurred to her. "Right and proper," she added.

Beckett put out her hands. "Okay," she said calmingly. "Except this is Richard Castle. This is his third year working with me." She reached back and caught Castle's arm, pulling him up to her side, and was about to go on before she saw Buffy's attention shift instantly to where the detective's hand rested on his sleeve.

"You can touch him?" she blurted out. "He's really here?"

"Well, of course—" Beckett started, but the Slayer interrupted.

"Detective? Can I do something and explain why later? I promise not to hurt him."

They stared at each other. "All right," Beckett said after a moment. "But if you do—"

She nodded, understanding, and stepped forward gingerly. To Castle's surprise and slight indignation, the young woman reached out and poked her index finger firmly into his chest.

"Hey!" he yelped at her.

"You're really real!" she said—the first words she'd said to him that weren't shouted or insults. "Okay, that's definitely the weirdest thing I've seen this year. And believe me, you got some competition."

Castle both earnestly wanted to know and really, really didn't.

"I'm really a writer," he told her. "I write mysteries. I'm working with Detective Beckett to do research for my books, and I like working with her, even though just between you and me and everyone else who's ever met us I get on her nerves quite a lot. But most of the time she likes me anyway. I think."

Buffy stared at him, listening intently—still slightly, he thought, convinced that he was some murderous agent of evil powers. He really wanted to convince her otherwise, so kept going, trying to cut down on the babbling. "I have a teenage daughter named Alexis, who may be the world's all-around best daughter. If they held a competition, she'd probably win. My mother's name is Martha, she's an actress. When she's not being a life coach or whatever else has caught her fancy this week, that is. They both live with me here in Manhattan. Should I keep going, or have you decided not to kill me?"

"For now," she said, which didn't exactly fill Castle with overwhelming confidence. "But mostly because Detective Beckett vouched for you. Caleb was a hell of a liar."

He was pushing his luck, he knew it, but couldn't help but ask: "So what makes you think I'm not lying to her?"

"Xander liked her," she said, which makes absolutely no sense to Castle whatsoever. "And I trust him."

Clearly it made more sense to Beckett. "The man I spoke to on the phone when I tried to get in touch with you?" she asked. _Oh yeah_, thought Castle.

"He's not actually my brother," Buffy said. "But we're close enough that he might as well be." This was apparently agreement.

Beckett nodded. "I see. I thought he might have been your boyfriend, seeing as he answered the phone at what we were told was your house."

"Um, no. Definitely not."

"We've been trying to find out what that call was about for days," Castle commented. "No one seems to know."

"We were talking about that before you came in," Beckett filled him in. "Why don't we start over from there? Maybe somewhere that doesn't have the entire Precinct eavesdropping?"

They moved the conversation to the interview room, and Castle finally got to hand Beckett her usual coffee.

"All right, let's try this again," Beckett started. "But first—I know you think you have the right to go everywhere armed, but I really don't like it when people I don't know bring weapons here."

"And?" the Slayer asked. She sounded more amused than curious, really.

Beckett held out a hand for it.

"No." They stared at each other for a moment. "I want it back _before_ we talk about Steph," she said, giving Beckett no chance to negotiate. When the older woman nodded, she drew the knife from the sheath in the small of her back and handed it over.

Curiously, Beckett turned the blade—if it was a blade—over and over in her hands. The body of the weapon was made entirely of wood, from the feel of it, shaped like a dagger and narrowing to a sharp and nasty point. It was edged in dull, but sharpened metal that merged with the wood in a way she couldn't explain. It was about the length and thickness of her hand. Beckett remembered from earlier that it was meant to be held with the blade pointing back along the forearm rather than pointing outwards like a small sword.

"Oh, that's clever," Castle enthused over her shoulder, despite the fact that less than five minutes ago it had been pointing at him. "That's just lovely; I want one, where did you get it?"

"Was a gift," the Slayer said shortly. "I don't think there are any others. Can I have it back now?"

Beckett handed it over reluctantly. "All right, now let's talk about Steph. I understand that she called you last weekend, about something that was upsetting her but she couldn't tell her friends about."

"Of course not," said Buffy. "One of them had betrayed her."

Well, that was cause for distress, no matter who you were. "Who?" Castle asked the obvious question.

It didn't have an obvious answer. "She wouldn't say." Buffy paused, shifted in her chair. "It's kind of hard to explain…it's sort of a joke, but it's not funny, that everyone in my family—" One hand described a circle, possibly unconsciously. "—has been evil at some time or another. It's also not exactly true; there's always Xander. He's good right down to the bone. But Steph called me because she wanted advice about how to deal with this friend. She wanted to get her friend back. It's possible."

"Man or woman?" asked Beckett.

"A man, I think. I was more interested in finding out what he'd done than who he was. And she did tell me that—" she said, and stopped. "Look, I know how this goes. You and me, we don't live in the same world. In mine, I can say that someone she cared about was summoning demons for no good reason and trading in stuff no one should own. In yours, you think I'm crazy or stupid. How the hell do you expect to get anything _done_?"

"Summoning demons?" Castle wondered. "Seriously?"

She glared. "See?"

He held up his hands in surrender. "No offense meant, it's just—would you need to buy things to do that? It's a real question and I really do want to know."

"Yes," she said. "I'm not the expert—mostly I deal with them once they're already here, but you need…stuff. Depending on what you want to call up and what you want to do with it once it gets here. And how quickly you want to send it back."

"The pawnshops!" Beckett and Castle chorused at each other.

"She wasn't buying things for herself—"

"—she was trying to find out what had already been bought—"

"—and what sort of mess her friend was in—"

"—and how much danger _she_ was in!"

Across from them, Buffy was wearing much the same look most people got after listening to Beckett and Castle do this little trick. If they'd ever noticed this expression on other people's faces, they would have been used to it by now.

"When you say she was worried about a friend," Castle asked her, "how close does that mean this person was to her? Could she be talking about a casual acquaintance, someone she happened to know, or more like someone who would have keys to her apartment and her email password?"

"She cared enough to call me, to try to find a way around becoming their enemy."

"So whoever this friend was, they mattered," Beckett clarified, and when Buffy had agreed with this statement, said to Castle, "Everyone here who's talked to us has insisted that something, some monster, killed Steph."

"I wonder which of them thought that was a convenient scapegoat," Castle completed her thought.

"Look," Buffy put in, "now that I'm here I'm gonna find out who killed her. I trained Steph; I liked her; I sent her here. She was my responsibility. And people will talk to me who won't talk to you, and people who won't talk to me will probably talk to, um, other people I know."

"You think you can close this case," Beckett said flatly. She didn't like self-proclaimed experts—or anyone, really—stepping into her case and taking it away from her in any way.

The Slayer shrugged. "Hey, my sister's the one who likes all that evidence stuff. She actually likes mysteries—and I am going to call her and see if she's heard of you," she added to Castle. "She likes to read; I don't have time. But this, this is something personal. Really you lot should never have been involved. I promise you that if one of her friends had found her first, the police would never have known about this. So Slayers would have been hunting the creature that did this anyway. Right now I'm offering to tell you about what we find out, but even if you're not interested I'm still going after it. Your call."

Put like that, there was really nothing Beckett could do about it. "All right. But I want regular updates."

This earned her a skeptical expression and the instant conviction that this young woman didn't take orders very well. "Why don't we—and probably Leesha and Perrin and their Scoobies—meet up later tonight?" Buffy suggested. "Where's your war room? Um, sorry. That's a place everyone gets together and talks?"

"How about the Old Haunt?" Castle suggested. "I'm buying."

Beckett liked the old bar more than she was sometimes willing to admit, so she was inclined to agree with Castle's choice. "That's a bar," she explained to Buffy. "He owns it; we and the other detectives that work with us hang out there after work sometimes."

"How long has it been there?" the Slayer asked, which seemed like an odd question to Castle, but he told her that it really was an old haunt, and had been there since before Prohibition. He didn't tell her the interesting treasure hunt story that went with it.

"We'll find it."

"9:30 tonight then," Beckett suggested. It was actually less of a suggestion than an order, but she wasn't sure how she was going to enforce it.

"Sure," Buffy called back as she left.

* * *

"So," Beckett said thoughtfully, looking over the murderboard. "We don't need to be looking at her enemies—we need to investigate her friends." She still wanted to find the man who had gotten into a fight with Steph at her dojo, and the teenage boy who might have been at the crime scene.

"Beckett! Castle!" Montgomery interrupted, striding out of his office. "What the _hell_ is this I'm hearing about a woman with a knife?"

"This might take a while," Castle muttered.

* * *

Later that evening, Beckett and Castle ended up at the Old Haunt much earlier than they had planned. Pizza delivery had taken care of dinner all around, up until Ryan and Esposito were temporarily pulled off the group's case to look into another body that had just dropped. They headed out reluctantly, but Castle promised that they'd all go and have a celebratory 'case closed' bash after both cases were, well, closed. The detective and the writer got there earlier than planned, but by 9:00 they had even managed to relax a little bit, taking advantage of the historical old bar's atmosphere and a little bit of alcohol all around.

As it was a Friday night, there were plenty of people crowding in and milling around. Beckett decided to hold down a table while Castle went to get drinks and probably talk to the people he'd hired or retained to actually run the bar. The crowds were everywhere, so even though the ambient music was low, she was taken by surprise when Buffy appeared out of the crowd and helped herself to a chair.

"You're early," Beckett pointed out, hoping her surprise hadn't shown on her face.

"This boat," the Slayer remarked, "both in it. Your partner here too?"

"Up at the bar. Why?"

She shrugged. "Just curious…so, how does a writer end up working with a detective anyway?"

Beckett explained, trying to compress the past two-and-a-half years of working relationship into a story that made sense. The result seemed to amuse the Slayer.

"So let me get this straight, Detective," she summed up, ticking off points on her fingers. "He follows you around, hits on you, makes sarcastic comments, gets in the way of your work, and still manages to help you out anyway?"

She had to agree that this was fairly accurate.

Buffy actually laughed aloud. "You know, I think I understand better than you think I do."

Before Beckett could ask for an explanation of this, Castle arrived back at the table bearing drinks.

"How is it that I'm always holding cups when you turn up?" Castle asked her as he pulled up a seat at the table next to his detective partner.

"My sister says you're you," she told Castle by way of a greeting, or possibly a reply. "In between the screaming and running off to find everyone else and show them your picture on the back of the book. You now have six votes for being this year's weirdest thing to happen. It would have been seven, but Willow and Kennedy broke up _again_ and they're not speaking to each other. Which is also with the again. Oh, and we're going to need more chairs around here."

Out of that, he'd managed to understand that he was officially no longer under suspicion for being an evil agent of evil things, which was good news, and he said so. "I'm pleased to hear it." He couldn't think of a better way to broach the topic, so he just blurted out, "So, I've been thinking, about what you said, me looking like someone you met who definitely wasn't me?"

"Yeah…I mostly believe you, but I still don't like it."

"Well, since he looked so much like me, maybe we're related? I've never actually known who my dad is, so maybe I have—or had, I guess—" he amended, remembering some gory details she'd mentioned earlier, "a half-brother? I mean, I don't look much like my mom—everyone else in my family has red hair."

She tipped her head on one side, looking at him critically. "Huh. I suppose maybe. That might explain how Caleb was around during the First War and you're still alive and well here."

"So when was that then?" said Castle.

"About four years ago. We've sort of taken to naming years rather than numbering them."

"And what's this year called?"

"This year's this year. Obviously. It'll get a name after it's over."

That…actually made sense. "So, Leesha—and Danielle too—mentioned something called the Second Age. Is that a year?" Danielle had explained, he recalled, but it was a safe subject to discuss.

She tapped her fingers on the table thoughtfully. "No, that's—do you really want a big complicated explanation about time? Of all the things you could ask about while we wait for Leesha and Perrin to get here?"

"I have a million questions," Castle lamented, "and no one will answer them. They all say that I wouldn't understand."

She sighed. "Well, it's not like I haven't given this same explanation for the past few years. I have someone who's supposed to be doing a film, but we keep having arguments about what's not OK for him to videotape. Also, he _will_ keep narrating, which is _definitely_ not OK."

"Wait," Beckett interrupted. "Who else is going to show up here tonight?"

"Well, Leesha and Perrin should be here, although they may not be able to stay for long," she began, counting off on her fingers. "I told them about someone betraying Steph, by the way. They're not happy. I didn't tell Danielle about it. I only met her today, so I don't know her well enough yet. She'll be here to stand for Steph, that's three. There's me. And my partner's around here somewhere, although I'm not sure exactly where. So five at least."

Beckett followed the Slayer's glance around the room, although if she had seen who she was looking for she hadn't shown it. The detective had already figured out that the younger woman hadn't come to town alone. When she'd thought about it, her friends (family?) in Stockbridge had slipped up and said _they_ at least once, and before Castle had come in this morning Buffy had said in refusing the coffee that she'd slept in the car. It made sense that someone else had been driving.

Castle made up for lost time by taking advantage of the one Slayer who hadn't answered his questions with 'you wouldn't understand'. "So…the Second Age? Was there a First Age, or is it the Second Age for a different reason?"

"There was a First Age," she assured him. "That's all of recorded history up until the Fall of Sunnydale."

"Hey, I've heard that name before somewhere," Beckett commented, listening with interest and actively trying to suppress the voice of rationality within her that said _this isn't how the world works!_ "That was a town, right?"

"In Southern California. It collapsed into the earth about four years ago."

"Oh yeah," Castle remembered. "They never did figure out how that happened."

She changed the subject in what seemed like, to Beckett, a hurry. Interesting. It made the detective suspect that she'd had something to do with it, although for the life of her she couldn't figure out how the Slayer had been involved—or why. "Since you asked, we actually figure in three times, although one of them was before humans and language and history. That's the dawn of time." She actually said it as one word, _dawnatime_. "Sometimes you'll hear people starting stories with 'wayback in the dawnatime' rather than 'once upon a time'. It's sort of vague when the First Age started. It's either when humans first showed up, or when the First Slayer was created to protect them."

"How was that done?" Castle asked eagerly.

"Go on. Make me say 'magic' so you can roll your eyes."

He declined to do so, and she went on, "The big difference between the First Age and the Second is that in the First Age, only one Slayer existed at a time in the whole world. When she died, someone else took her place. At least, mostly," she added. "We managed to screw things up a little bit and there were actually two Slayers for a while—me and Faith. She still thinks that we don't get along because we weren't meant to exist together, although we get along a lot better now that she's off at Lightspeed and we only talk to each other on the phone a few times a year. But this is the Second Age now and there are hundreds of us, and some of them actually don't piss each other off, so I still think she's wrong."

"Is that a place?" Castle wanted to know. It had sounded like a place, if only because it couldn't actually mean _at light speeds_…could it?

"Oh—yeah. Sorry. There are places where the…barriers…between this world and the demon dimensions are too thin. It's sort of a magnet for bad stuff. We use the word 'Hellmouth', and yes, it's definitely a curse. There used to be one in Sunnydale—I spent seven years trying to keep it from exploding and destroying the world. Since there isn't a Sunnydale anymore, there obviously isn't one there now. But there's another one in Cleveland. Faith and a few other Slayers are keeping a lid on things there."

Evidently more explanation was needed. "You see, no one can remember whether they decided to call their headquarters Cleveland Command or Cleveland Central—maybe it was both—so someone abbreviated it to C-Squared. We called it that for a while, and then it got out of hand and someone else started calling it Lightspeed, because that's apparently what c-squared means. So it's Lightspeed now."

Castle was grinning. "I love this case," he said for the first time that day. Being yelled at and the steady stream of dead ends that had plagued the day had temporarily dampened his enthusiasm for it, but this was much better. "It's so cool! So there are really monsters?"

She sighed. "Oh yes. There are more of them than you probably think there are."

"No way. Someone would have noticed."

"Plenty of people have, just a lot more people don't believe them."

"_I _noticed," Beckett pointed out tartly, reminding him that she'd met Steph by investigating a death-by-monsters case in the first place.

"And besides," continued Buffy, slightly annoyed over having her expertise questioned, "some demons and most vampires can pass for human if they're careful about it, so maybe you've met one before."

They looked skeptically at her, and she grinned. "Well, I know for a fact there's at least one vampire around here, but you probably wouldn't have known otherwise."

This, of course, resulted in both detectives professional and amateur twisting around in their chairs to scan the bar-patronizing crowd with interest and/or doubt. They saw…people, in groups or alone, hanging out or here to drink, rowdy or peaceful.

"All right, how do you know?" Castle demanded, flushing slightly as his conspicuous staring began to draw attention.

She was wearing an expression that he suspected was mischief. "Some Slayers can just tell by looking. Apparently it's just another way of feeling, like holding your hand by a fire and knowing that it's hot."

Beckett noticed that she'd said "Apparently? You can't do it?"

Oh yes, it was definitely mischief. "No, although my Watcher—um, you'd say teacher—insisted for ages that I could do it if I only tried. I stopped trying and ran off to fight things, so it didn't work out."

Castle couldn't stop staring around, despite the staring back he was getting from several people. "So how can you tell?"

"Well," she shrugged, "_you_ can't. _I _can tell 'cause we've known each other since I was sixteen and he was trying to kill me. We haven't actually tried to kill each other for several years now, although we do an awful lot of arguing and we still do fight."

"Huh?" said Castle, and was instantly ashamed. He was an internationally best-selling author! And the best he could come up with was 'huh?'

"I'm just warning you," she said calmly, "because the minute Leesha gets here she's going to start screaming if he doesn't have the sense to—" Her voice went up slightly, as if someone were listening in. "—stay out of her way. She has a thing about vampires, and not in a good way. She _really_ hates my partner 'cause she's not allowed to kill him. Well, she tried. Didn't work out so well for her. And she's going to be none too happy that I brought him here to her city. If there's a fight, stay out of it. We'll deal—and she'll have to."

Beckett's voice dripped skepticism. "Oh, come on, Buffy. You don't actually expect us to believe that your 'somewhere around here' partner is a vampire, do you? That's so…_Twilight_." She'd made the mistake of reading that book at the recommendation of a friend and hated it.

Buffy looked scandalized. "Detective! _Shame_ on you! Do you have any idea how much trouble that book caused us? Is still causing? How many starstruck teenage girls we don't manage to rescue?" She leaned on the table, propping her chin in one hand. "We ended up naming the year before last after it, actually," she admitted. "That was a bad year."

Sensing that he was being set up for a punch line, Castle asked anyway. "What did you call it?"

She blinked at him innocently. "The Twilight Zone."

Castle laughed so hard he nearly spilled his drink across the table.

* * *

Leesha did arrive a few minutes later, with Steph's friend Danielle only a few steps behind. As they made their way through the crowds, Castle was having an absolutely marvelous time learning some of the names that the Slayers had given past years. He'd already learned that 'The New Year' meant something entirely different from _new year's_, and that one was the first year of the Second Age and the other was apparently May 20th, which was the day that town Sunnydale had fallen into the earth and the Second Age had began. He had yet to figure out why the Glory Days weren't actually very glorious but had learned that the year after that was called the Dark Ages because it had been 'a bad year for everyone'. And apparently Buffy no longer thought that he was a minion of evil, which was good news; he was already sure that he did not, for any reason, want to be her enemy.

"Any news?" Leesha asked, taking a seat herself.

"Actually, we're looking at a new line of investigation," Beckett told her. "We'll need Danielle's help, though."

"Me?" quavered Danielle, who looked decidedly worse for wear. She looked as if her friend's death had sunk in to stay, and also as if this wasn't the first bar she'd stopped off at tonight. "What the hell can I do?"

"I need a list of all Steph's friends," said the detective gently. "Everyone she was close to."

"Why? What's it matter anymore?"

Beckett was about to explain, but Buffy caught her eye and shook her head slightly. Best not to tell her. "Because maybe she said something that was important," the blonde Slayer told Danielle. "Something small."

Danielle had slumped over in her seat, and now stared up at Buffy through a fringe of brown curls, thinking through this reason. "As y' say, lady," she finally muttered with drunken courtesy.

Beckett passed her notebook across the table along with a pen. "Sooner would be better, Danielle," she suggested, and the young woman began to write down names in exaggeratedly careful capitals.

Perrin turned up as Danielle had begun to suck thoughtfully on the end of Beckett's pen, which the detective made a mental note to dispose of as soon as possible. "I'll be right there," she said in passing. "Think the bar will sell me a glass of ice?" She sported the beginnings of a livid bruise on her left cheekbone.

"Tell them to put it on my tab," Castle called after her. Making her way up to the bar, she waved back at him thankfully.

"There," Danielle said. "That's all of us."

Beckett looked over the names. "What about outside your circle?" she asked. "I need a complete list, Danielle."

"Oh." She took it back. "I'll try."

Perrin returned with a towel wrapped around a handful of ice chips. "Well?" she demanded of Beckett and Castle. "Found a human that can kill one of us yet?"

"Most of our leads have dried up," Beckett had to admit. "We spent the day in pawn shops that Steph had bought items from, but no one remembered her asking anything out of the ordinary or buying anything that we didn't find at her apartment. They kept records, so we could confirm that. And if Esposito and Ryan were here, they'd tell you that their teenage witnesses weren't worth anything," she continued. "We had two high-school senior guys connected to this case, and we knew they knew each other. One was a student of hers at the dojo where she worked. The other we can place at the crime scene."

"A guard chased out a bunch of teenagers boozing, but they left some bottles. Our second guy left a fingerprint on a bottle there," Castle explained to the Slayers and Danielle.

"But," Beckett ignored her partner's interruption, "we now know that her former student was on the opposite side of town when she was killed. He still had the receipts from the pizza parlor in his wallet. We checked it against his credit card. And we have a traffic cam that shows the second guy getting out of a taxi and going into his parents' apartment before Steph was killed. We checked other cameras on other doors, and he didn't go out."

"And we still can't find the guy who got into a fight with her on purpose. There might even be two guys," Castle pointed out regretfully.

"Okay!" Danielle broke in, shoving the notebook away from her and back towards Beckett. "That's everyone I can think of. Talk to all of them if you like."

Beckett picked up the notebook but declined to retrieve the chewed-up pen. Scanning the list, she asked, "Who's 'Taylor', Danielle? There's no last name."

"I dunno who Taylor is," the brunette admitted. "He's this guy she mentioned sometimes, I never met 'im. I don't think they were dating, but maybe, like, she wanted to be? But she stopped talking about him a couple of weeks ago, so maybe she changed her mind."

No one they'd talked to about Steph had mentioned anything about her having a boyfriend.

"I called her and offered to set her up with someone on Monday," Leesha remembered. "She said she wanted to be single for a while—so maybe they broke up."

Danielle shook her head too vigorously. "We would have known. You can't hide something like that!"

"You'd be surprised what you can hide from your Scoobies, if you try," Buffy said absently, her attention drifting away from the conference around the table. "Back in a moment," she said to no one in particular, getting up and heading across the room into the crowd.

Neither Perrin nor Leesha had ever heard of the mysterious 'Taylor', but they rather shiftily confirmed that they both had things they didn't tell "you know, _everyone_…"

"A boyfriend, either past or present, may solve one of the problems we've had with this case so far," Beckett told the others, "which is that we haven't found a motive for an ordinary human to kill her. And I guess none of you have found anything specific either?"

The Slayers admitted they hadn't. Danielle scowled and said she needed a drink, eying the bar with the air of one planning a military invasion.

"You need black coffee," Leesha told her shortly. "Or maybe a Sprite. I'll get you a Sprite."

"And more ice," Perrin requested. She unfolded her towel, which she'd been applying erratically to her bruise. It dripped pitifully on the table. "It melted," she added unnecessarily.

"Give it here." Perrin handed over the sodden cloth and Leesha left bar-wards with it. Danielle put her head down on the table and sniffled slightly.

"Whozat?" she mumbled after a moment.

"Who's who?" asked the tall Slayer, more for the sake of keeping poor Danielle awake than actual curiosity.

Danielle pointed through a gap in the crowd at Buffy, who was standing against one wall talking intensely with a bleached-blonde man who looked to be about her age and was wearing a long leather coat. They were standing close enough to each other to whisper, despite the ambient noise lever, but Castle doubted there was any whispering actually going on. Buffy looked far too annoyed to be keeping her voice down. The writer had actually noticed the Slayer's companion sometime earlier, when he'd been staring around the room so rudely. He'd been one of the people who had stared back.

Perrin laughed aloud. "I knew it!" she said. "We talked earlier, her and me," she told Beckett and Castle. "She used 'we' _far_ too many times for one of her people to not be with her, and since it was the middle of the day and she was alone I figured it had to be him." To the back of Danielle's head, she added, "Buffy may be the leader the Slayers don't have, but she has this really bad habit of dating vampires. That's Spike. I met him a couple times when I was training at Stockbridge. He's okay, I guess…as long as she's around."

"Tha's nuts," Danielle told the table.

She shrugged. "They seem to make it work, although no one's sure how." Meditatively, she commented: "Leesha's gonna have a fit."

"About what?" Leesha herself asked, returning to the table with a glass of fizzy clear liquid, a far more interesting looking martini, and an honest-to-goodness icepack slung over one arm. "Danielle, wake up."

Danielle's protest of "Not asleep" went mostly ignored as Perrin flicked a casual thumb in the direction of the Slayer and her partner.

Following her gesture, Leesha's eyes went very cold. She handed Perrin her icepack, gulped her own martini with the air of one who does not intend to come back for the rest of it, and set off at a dead march to confront the odd couple.

"You should go," Perrin confided to the detective and the writer, who were watching Leesha pick a fight with dumbfounded amazement. "Nothing useful will be said for the rest of the night."

Castle flinched as fragments of the evolving quarrel began to drift back to their table. So far he hadn't been able to pick out any words, but he didn't need to. It didn't look good for Leesha, and the little Slayer was clearly determined to ignore this fact for as long as humanly possible.

"Can you tell her not to bust up my bar too much?" he asked Perrin resignedly. "I don't want to have to pay for more repairs than I have to."

She chewed slightly on her lip, watching the action. "I'll tell you what. You have a car? Okay, you take Danielle home—I'll give you her address—and I'll see if I can break up that fight without getting mauled. And hopefully before Leesha gets too badly hurt. She's good—but she's _way_ outclassed."

Deciding to reserve judgment on the whole evening and settle for the information she'd gotten, Beckett agreed that a timely retreat was indeed in order. She roused Danielle and began to walk her towards the stairs leading out of the Old Haunt. "Come on, Castle," she called back over her shoulder. "Let them sort it out and you can come back and survey the damage tomorrow."

He winced. "Lack of damage, please, Detective. Let's not tempt fate, okay? Can you imagine the _amount_ of damage they could do?"

Actually, she could. Slayers trashed places hard.

"All the more reason to leave now, don't you think?" With the hand that wasn't holding up poor Danielle, she ran her fingers over the notebook in her pocket. They needed to narrow down which of Steph's friends might have had a reason to kill her. And they definitely needed to find the mysterious Taylor.

* * *

**Next Chapter:** Suspects are lined up. Evidence gets its day. Explanations leak out grudgingly. The Mystery of Taylor grows. And…Le'letha goes beyond the bounds of title-snitching.

**Author's Note:** Firstly, I like to name things. You have noticed this. The 'Twilight Zone' gag? Irre_sist_ible! Because I think it's hilarious that the comics (which I have not read and have been told not to) have a villain named Twilight, and that book would cause more trouble for the Slayers than anything else out there. (Like Beckett, I read the first one in utter naïveté and have pointedly not read or watched anything further.) I also entertained myself for a while by naming each season. I'm easily amused. Secondly, I just made myself a shipper target, didn't I? Again, I don't know what happens in the comics, but after paying careful attention to character development and basic personalities, I can't imagine them not getting back together again. Also, they have fun arguments. How can you pass that up? Thirdly, I foresee probably two more chapters in this story. All the pieces are in place and I'm starting to tie them together.

Oh, and if you didn't spot my 'gotcha' line…shame on you.


	7. Chapter 7: Once More With Feeling

**Chapter Seven: Once More With Feeling**

**Apology: **Spring Break. And I spent it watching _Stargate: Universe_, which didn't exactly help me write the distinctive voices of everyone in this story. It (_SGU_) was an interesting concept, but I didn't actually feel connected to any of the characters…I spent most of it missing SG-1! (And yes, I know they show up from time to time, why do you think I kept watching?) But that's a different and incredibly less interesting story. Once I started writing, though, I had to get out of bed at ridiculous hours of the morning to, say, add two and a half pages of text onto the beginning of the chapter. My writing brain only works when it's inconvenient.

**Author's Note:** Yes, yes I went there. My shamelessness knows no bounds. But there was really nothing else that worked for this chapter. And I know you don't believe me. Let me know if this chapter changes your mind, okay?

**And:** Oh. Wow. "47 Seconds". ARGH! (cries on floor) SADNESS!

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

Spending time waiting for the Department of Motor Vehicles to get around to your request was never enjoyable, but if you had to do so, Kate Beckett had long since decided, it was better to do so over the telephone than in person. There were infinitely fewer small children in the immediate proximity, and you could always get coffee from the break room, check your email inbox, order pastries from that nearby bakery that had just started delivering on the other line (and eat them too), or even take a bathroom break if there was anyone nearby who would fill in for you by listening to the taped 'holding' message for a few minutes.

If you were really desperate, you could do paperwork.

Eventually, the overworked state employee on the other end of the line got back to her with the proper names and contact information of the people on Danielle's list of Steph's friends—all except the still unidentified "Taylor". Hanging up on the DMV with a sense of relief, and discarding the pastry wrappers in her desk trashcan, Beckett was about to get to work on calling her way through everyone on the list when she was interrupted.

"Detective Beckett? It's me again."

'Me again' was Buffy Summers, who had yet again managed to walk past a precinct full of cops, all of whom would tell her that she was not supposed to be in the Homicide detectives' bullpen without an escort or at least a visitor's pass. Unsurprisingly, she had neither.

By now, Beckett had accepted that Slayers followed different rules and decided to let it slide. Mostly. Beckoning the young woman into Castle's usual chair, she couldn't help commenting, "If I was half that good at getting into places I wasn't supposed to be, I wouldn't need the bulletproof vest. I'm impressed." And, before she forgot, "So did you destroy Castle's bar, or can I reassure him that he won't have to pay for more repairs?"

The blonde Slayer grinned. "Well, Leesha went a bit stake-happy and broke a chair, but that's about it. There might be some broken glasses, but the building is still standing, I promise." She caught her breath at that last sentence and went on, "Actually, I need a favor. But I think it'll help you too."

"Well, I've just spent an hour on the phone, and I'm going to have to spend the next calling everyone who ever knew Steph. I'd be happy to take a break, especially a useful one. What do you need?"

"Yesterday," Buffy explained, somewhat sheepishly, "when I was up here, I saw something in your files—about Steph. I think it was a picture, but I can't remember what it was of. I know I wasn't supposed to look at them the first time, but I knew it mattered, and then your friend Castle turned up, which was really weird, and I forgot."

Beckett raised a skeptical eyebrow at her. "You want to look at all the paperwork on Steph. Again. For something you're not sure about."

"I'll know it when I see it," she retorted indignantly. "And if it is important, it might help us all find who killed a friend of mine."

The two women watched each other for a minute, considering their options. Finally, Beckett relented, gesturing slightly as if actually throwing her hands in the air in resignation.

"All right. What are we looking for? And how much of what was on my desk did you get through? You couldn't have been up here alone for more than a few minutes."

Having gotten what she wanted, Buffy was all smiles again. "Detective, I can't count the hours I've spent paging through old books to find something—anything—important before we run out of time to save the world. My family's gotten really good at Research Mode. And, well, if I was really good at it, I'd know what I saw without having to wake up early and ask for help. But I was thinking about it so much it kept me awake…and if I fidgeted any more, I was going to get picked up and dumped out of bed whether I liked it or not, so I came here."

As she spoke, she was sorting through file folders and message slips, looking at each page briefly before going on to the next. Beckett hurriedly picked up and re-stacked a handful of manila folders that had gotten out of order.

"Can I help? You said it was a picture? Person, place, or thing?"

"Yeah, picture," the younger woman muttered absently, flicking through photographs of the crime scene where they'd found Steph's body. Almost involuntarily, she was growling softly at the images. "Not a person. A thing. Brown, maybe pottery? Got writing on it. Not English."

Beckett organized things visually and remembered what she saw—that was why she, alone of all the detectives at the 12th, solved cases using a murderboard. Being able to see things helped her remember what was what and spot patterns. Castle, on the other hand, kept track of things by turning them into a narrative. They both played to their strengths. So Beckett knew that there were only a limited number of photographs of things that had been taken in this case.

Locating and opening the file of photographs that had been taken of Steph's apartment, Beckett scanned the images for things that fit the vague criteria the Slayer had given her. After a moment, she said, "Is this it?"

Buffy dropped the folder she was holding on the desk—Beckett winced as documents spilled out—and reached for the photo the detective held. She handed it over without a fuss, having seen no more relevance in it this time than when she'd first seen it.

"Yes," the Slayer said definitely, smiling. She had a nice smile. "That's it. That's what I saw. Thanks, Kate."

Beckett was somewhat taken aback by the sudden informality, but after a moment, not surprised. Even after only knowing her for a few hours, she could already say with the utmost confidence that Buffy was not a formal person. "So what is it?" she asked, gently turning the picture back towards her so she could look too.

It looked like half of a statuette, although what the complete figure had represented was impossible to discern from what was left. Based on the contortions of the image in the photo, it had never been anything human. The half-statue was fairly small, about the size and width of a hand—the crime scene tech who had taken the photo had deliberately included his hand in the picture as a point of comparison. It was a rich cinnamon brown in the artificial lighting provided by the photographer, but was covered in jet-black markings that might be letters in no language the detective had ever seen, or might equally possibly be a child's random scribbles.

When Beckett quietly pointed out that there would be information on the back of the picture, the two women read together that it had been found in Steph's closet along with her weapons cache, wrapped in a ball of rags and sealed shut with masking tape. Whoever had logged the item had also added that they were unable to identify the material it was made out of without a laboratory analysis, and also that it seemed to be broken. The rest of it, whatever it was, had not been found.

"I have absolutely no idea," Buffy responded to Beckett's question, but she didn't sound discouraged. "But it looks important, don't you think?"

Beckett gave her the skeptical look again. It was marginally less effective this time.

"Um…can I use your computer? I don't know what this is, and you don't know what it is, but I can almost promise that if Willow gets one look at this, _she'll_ not only know what it is, but where it was made and what it smells like when it gets wet. She's good like that."

There was clearly no help for it. "You're lucky I'm used to unconventional police work, Buffy. But only this image, understood? And don't tell my captain I'm letting you do this."

"Rules are boring, Kate," Buffy told her helpfully. "You should only follow rules that work for you."

Beckett couldn't help the grin at such a defiant philosophy. "That's how you do things, is it? And how's that worked out so far?"

"If I followed all the rules all the time, I'd be dead. Again. …So pretty well, considering."

* * *

Buffy, as it turned out, couldn't work a scanner, because "Willow and Dawn do the computer things". She could attach an image and send an email, and left promising to let Beckett know if her friends came up with anything useful. Only after she was long gone did the detective realize that she still had no way to contact the younger woman if _she_ needed to.

Until then, Beckett had phone calls to make. She briefly considered texting Castle to see if he would come in and at least keep her company and make her desk and space feel not quite so empty, but decided against it, because if she just wanted someone to sit, talk, and not be helpful she'd have gotten herself a parrot instead of a partner. (She decided not to tell him about this comparison until a day when he was being more than usually annoying.)

As she spoke to a parade of confused and increasingly upset men and women—most of whom sounded like they were in their teens or early twenties, although a couple sounded older—Beckett noted the replies to a set of standard questions. She started off by asking each person to define and describe their relationship to Steph, including where and when they had met, and then asked everyone if they knew who Taylor was. No one could give her any more information than Danielle had last night, making the detective wonder if the unknown man was really all that important. Almost everyone on her list of calls to make said that they had been close friends with Steph, and none of those had ever met Taylor. It was possible he was irrelevant to Steph's gruesome death, but it was a loose end she couldn't leave dangling.

Also, as a certain visiting blonde Slayer had pointed out last night, you'd be surprised what you can hide from your friends, if you try.

Beckett asked all of them for an alibi. Each and every one of them practically howled with rage, denied any possibility of their involvement, insisted that she just didn't _understand_ the bond between a Slayer and her companions, and then gave her the information she wanted anyway.

Jotting down yet another alibi, she glanced over at Ryan and Esposito's desks and hoped that either the boys would be back soon, or Castle would show up and volunteer to call around helping her to verify alibis. This would have been a fairly unprecedented event, but then most things her writer partner did were unprecedented or unconventional in some way. Including hunting for a secret passage and offering to explore it with a toilet-paper-and-plunger torch; ordering a customized bulletproof vest with WRITER blazoned all over it; and borrowing-without-permission a federal agent's Taser gun and then actually shooting someone with it, to name only three examples.

Lastly, she asked each of Steph's friends who _they_ thought had killed their Slayer friend, and dutifully wrote down their answers even if she thought they belonged in a Hollywood horror movie rather than a police report. Once or twice she had to ask for definitions. The answers, when she hung up on the last person and reviewed her results, were wide-ranging and decidedly esoteric. The only common factor was that no one had fingered another of Steph's circle, which was practically unheard of in Beckett's experience. There was always that one person—the family member with a grudge, the friend who had been publically shunned—who someone else would point out and say, "_They_ could have done it, because this one time…"

Sometime during her protracted phone conversations, Beckett noticed then, someone had stopped by her desk and left a stuffed legal-sized envelope. She vaguely remembered the presence of one of the department's mail runners, of whom she had never learned the name. When she put aside her telephone notes and opened it, she found that it contained the laptop that she and Castle had retrieved from Steph's apartment back on Wednesday. Also included was a note from the technical division indicating that they had sufficiently cleared their backlog to have the time to break through the password-protection Steph had set up on what was clearly her personal computer.

Before she could boot up the laptop and investigate its contents, however, the elevator _bing_ed and all her guys emerged from the elevator, laughing and joking together as they made their way towards her through the small crowd waiting to use the elevator. Castle was doing an elaborate pantomime of a…actually, she had no idea…as Ryan and Esposito egged him on.

"Well, if it isn't the Three Stooges," Beckett greeted them. "Morning, Stooges."

Castle paused in mid-pantomime and grinned at her. "Morning, Beckett! And I call not Moe."

"Hey, bro, don't knock Moe," teased Esposito, grinning at his involuntary rhyme. "What if she says you're Moe?"

"Then I'd be very sad," Castle said, oozing sincerity in an obviously insincere manner.

"Guys?" Beckett broke in over Ryan adding, "But he'd do it." They dragged their collective attention back to her. "Can we focus? And don't you two have a case to close?"

Ryan waved a hand dismissively. "Nah, easy solve. The guy was right down the street, back in the bar he'd left earlier when he and the vic got thrown out for throwing punches at each other."

"Guess we're back on your case," Esposito said.

"Yeah," she said pointedly, "I noticed that."

"Oh _man_, Esposito, walked right into that one," joked Castle, who'd sprawled out in his usual chair. Beckett smacked his shoulder lightly with her notepad of phone records and then handed it off in the direction of the guys.

"Based on what we learned yesterday," she brought Ryan and Esposito up to speed, "we know we should be checking out Steph's friends as well as her enemies. I've talked to everyone on this list and gotten alibis from them that need confirming, which is what needs doing next. We still don't know who 'Taylor' is, although several of these people had also heard of him but never met him."

Ryan was paging through the notes as he listened. "What's 'chiragos'?" he asked, reading it off the bottom of the page. Turning to the next, he read on and pulled a face equal parts disgust and skepticism. (Beckett had made substantially the same face earlier.) "Oh. Seriously?"

She sympathized. "Luckily, that's not our job to find out," she reminded him. "Alibis are. Come on, someone in this case is lying to us, and I want to know who. Otherwise we'll end up investigating Chirago demons, and none of us want to do that; I stopped writing before he stopped explaining."

That unenviable outcome was further put off by Beckett's desk phone ringing. "Beckett," she acknowledged as she picked it up. After a moment, she said, "Really?" and a little later, "Yes, absolutely. Bring him in."

Hanging up and turning to her audience, she smiled. "Traffic just picked up one Mr. Brian Walton for speeding through a red light on his way out of Manhattan."

"Isn't that the guy who—" Castle asked after a moment.

"Started and lost a fight with Steph and may have been kicked out of Krimmson by her? Yes, it is. The traffic cop who pulled him over ran his ID through the database and triggered the APB we put out on him. They're bringing him downtown to the 12th as we speak."

Ryan and Esposito traded looks. "Well…" Esposito said with the air of one about to confer a great favor on someone else, "since we barely had to do anything on last night's case and you called all these people—"

"—and listened to ridiculous descriptions of nasty things—" contributed Ryan.

"—we can check alibis while you take on the guy in the Box."

"Thanks, guys," said Beckett, who had been intending to dump the alibi chase on them anyway but was happy to let them volunteer.

"Post-case drinks at the Old Haunt are on me," Castle offered as his own thank-you.

"Dude," said Ryan pityingly, "they were on you _anyway_."

Castle had to acknowledge that this was true, and the two detectives headed off to their respective desks satisfied.

Beckett stared around him at the murderboard. "I still feel like we're missing half the case," she said ruminatively to him. "I can't remember the last time I got a murder victim whose life I couldn't investigate properly. Even people who don't respect the police understand that we're still a force to be reckoned with, but the world Steph moved in? My badge is worth about as much as those chocolate ones."

"Those are good," Castle said cheerfully, but immediately sobered up as he organized a reply to Beckett's musing. "But that's why you've consulted the experts, right? If the victim had been pulled up from the bottom of the East River, and you wanted to know if there could still be evidence down there, you'd talk to divers—you wouldn't jump in to see what the bottom was like for yourself. Right?"

She actually laughed. "Of course I wouldn't jump in the river, Castle—do you have any idea how cold that water is?"

"Exactly," he beamed. "Always better to talk to the experts. I mean, look how well consulting _me_ worked out!"

His grin was so obnoxious she wished she had her notepad back to smack him with, and had to settle for her best stinkeye.

* * *

Brian Walton was a big guy, but he moved with the assurance of someone who had been big his entire life and had learned to use his size to his advantage. Although he wasn't exactly overweight, he looked as if he had the potential to be at some point in a careless or neglectful future. He also looked angry rather than upset about being taken downtown to the 12th Precinct and put in an interrogation room. At the moment, Walton was aiming that look at the two-way mirror, and since he couldn't see where the person—Castle—behind it was, he had settled for panning from one end of the reflector to the other in a slow and patient swivel. For the past three minutes, he had also been tapping his fingers irregularly on the metal surface of the desk. The arrhythmic beat, magnified by the sound-activated recorder bolted to the table, was getting more on Castle's nerves every second it continued.

Castle broke away from the one-way staring contest when his detective partner beckoned to him with a manila file folder on her way past the viewing room. Following her into the interrogation room, he took his seat and let Beckett take the lead. She was good at many things, he would be the first to aver, but interrogation of a suspect was definitely at the top of the list.

"Mr. Walton," she began smoothly, catching and holding his gaze and dropping the file folder she carried onto the desk between them, "I'm Detective Kate Beckett. I see that you have been informed of your rights and declined a lawyer. Do you know why you're here?"

"Not unless you lot have stepped up the penalties for being in a hurry," he retorted. "Look, I have a flight to catch in a couple of hours. I was going to be early for once. Whatever this is about, let's just get it over with, okay?"

"A flight, huh?" Beckett asked. "To where, exactly?"

"Does it matter? Seattle."

She smiled a taut and somewhat insincere, to the experienced Castle eye, smile. "Tell me, Mr. Walton, do you know this woman?" Opening the file folder in a way that ensured he couldn't see the remaining contents, Beckett pulled out a picture of Steph that had been taken when she was still alive, and laid it on the table, facing him.

Walton took one look at the photo and his scowl deepened even further. "What the hell? Yeah, I know who that is. What's she done? That bitch attack someone else?"

"Did she attack you?" she countered, working with his choice of words.

"Broke my wrist," confirmed Walton, raising one large fist in illustration. "Seriously," he added, rapping that fist onto the photo still lying on the table, "that woman's dangerous. She's got real problems."

As interesting as that line of discussion was, Beckett couldn't pass up such an obvious transition. "I would say so, Mr. Walton. It doesn't get much more real than dead."

Walton's glare lost some of its fire, and he snatched his hand away from the picture as if it had caused her death. "What? How?" Beckett didn't immediately respond, and his confidence rebounded rapidly. "She finally take on someone tougher than her? Oh, I bet she did. Did someone shoot her? 'Cause I told her, all the super-strength in the world wasn't going to help her if she pissed off someone with a gun."

"Sounds like you knew her pretty well," Castle put in. "Give her a lot of advice, did you?"

He sized up Castle, picking up on those little hints that said Castle wasn't actually a cop. "No way, man. She wouldn't have listened anyway."

"So tell me more about this conversation you and Ms. Amador had, when you told her that all her strength wouldn't do her any good," Beckett said. She wanted to know if Walton was aware of just how strong Steph had been.

"It was maybe a month and a half ago—I'd just signed up for that gym she worked at. I came in the next day to look around, get a feel for the place, and I saw her moving some of the equipment around like she'd been using it. And it was big, heavy equipment, right? Stuff that has 'team lift' stamped all over it, but she was hauling it around like I could move this chair I'm sitting on." Walton glanced from one to the other as if checking whether or not they believed him. "I kind of stared for a minute, and then she saw me and got all embarrassed, like I'd forget what I'd seen if she shuffled her feet and distracted me enough."

"And you said…" Beckett prompted.

"Oh, that I was impressed, of course. Asked her where I could learn to do that, 'cause if that little slip of a girl could work out enough to move that stuff, I bet I could move, say, a car. She said it wasn't learned, you were made that way or you weren't. I asked what made her so special, and she shrugged and said she didn't know—and she was lying, by the way," Walton interrupted himself. "I could see it. She wasn't even trying very hard to hide it. And that's when I told her muscle wasn't everything, and some punk with a gun could take her down. She just glared at me and walked away. So was she shot?" He might have been unaware of the look on his face, which said that he wasn't particularly upset by the prospect.

"Actually," said Castle, "she was poisoned. And then someone bled her to death in a condemned building."

Walton grimaced. "She must have made someone really mad."

"Yes, we've been putting together quite a list," said Beckett, pulling another sheet of paper out of the file folder and looking over it. From his seat beside her, Castle could see that it was actually a page of Steph's phone records, but if the lighting allowed Walton to see through the page, all he would see were phone numbers, possibly of suspects. "You're on it, Mr. Walton."

He laughed a nervous, I-can't-believe-this-is-happening-to-me laugh. "Okay, yeah, she broke my wrist, but that wasn't personal or anything. It was just a practice bout that got out of hand."

"Not according to the staff at the gym," Beckett contradicted him. "According to them, you first cursed at her and then told her that…she was unnatural and didn't belong on this earth."

"Sure you didn't follow up on that and take her off it, Mr. Walton?" Castle asked pointedly. It sounded like a threat to him.

"Yeah, sure, 'cause you don't shout when you get hurt? I wasn't _thinking_. I didn't mean any of it—even if I did say that! You ever broken a bone? Helps to yell, you know!"

Beckett reached into the case file once again. "Apart from that incident, sir, did you have any other confrontations with this woman? Not necessarily at the gym—did you ever meet her anywhere else?"

He shook his head. "No. I didn't want to see her again, and it's a big city. What, you think I was just going to walk into her on the street?"

"Sure," Castle told him. "I run into people I know all the time."

"Have you ever been to a coffee shop called Krimsonn?" asked Beckett.

"What the hell? A coffee shop? What's that got to do with anything?" he exclaimed.

"Just answer, please, sir."

Walton had never really stopped scowling, but the expression changed tone a little bit as he thought about it. "I don't think so. I don't drink much coffee."

She placed a freeze-frame from the coffee shop recording next to the photograph of Steph. It showed a man who looked an awful lot like Brian Walton being marched out of Krimsonn by Steph. "Are you this man?"

He snatched the picture up and peered at it closely. "I don't believe it. They recorded that?"

"Mr. Walton?" Beckett encouraged him.

"Okay, look, I had a bad day and I was pretty sloshed. I took a wrong turn and got confused. Really, I don't remember much of that night until I woke up back at my apartment with the hangover from hell. I only know that's me because of the time and date stamp."

Personally, Castle would disagree with the description of 'pretty sloshed'. In the video, Walton was visibly drooling. That was a bit more than 'sloshed'. If drunkenness was drinks, it made 'shaken, not stirred' look like hot chocolate.

He looked around as if for sympathy. "I haven't binged that badly in a long time. And I haven't since. I took a three-hour shower, put some stuff on the bruises and bumps I'd picked up, and went out and got a haircut. I vaguely remember Steph being there, but then I remembered something blue and floating with red eyes showing up too."

Neither Beckett nor Castle had referred to their victim as 'Steph'. Walton clearly knew her better than he was claiming.

"So you had no grudge against Ms. Amador," Beckett said skeptically. "Even though she'd forcibly evicted you from an establishment when you were indisposed and on one occasion caused you physical harm."

Walton glared. "Look here, Detective. I didn't like her. She was arrogant and overconfident and showed off strength she hadn't worked for and hadn't earned. There was definitely something weird about her. And I'm pretty sure that she didn't like me. But I didn't kill her. Even if I wanted her dead, I wouldn't have to kill her. The way she acted, she was going to get herself into serious trouble before very long. I'm not surprised someone killed her. But I didn't do it."

Beckett was supremely noncommittal. "I'm pleased to hear that, sir. Can you tell me where you were last Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning?"

* * *

"I wish we could arrest people for being jerks," Castle complained a few minutes later as they left Walton to wait impatiently in the interrogation room.

"I don't like him much either, Castle," his detective partner sympathized, "but if we started arresting jerks, we'd run out of cell space before we even got to the end of the street."

He was still laughing as Ryan and Esposito intercepted them on their way back to the bullpen.

"Alibis check out." Ryan delivered bad news with a shrug, handing Beckett her notepad. "Please, take this terrifying list of strange things stranger people believe in away."

"So what's the verdict on your guy?" Esposito asked. Taking another look at their expressions, he amended, "Not good there either, huh?"

Beckett put her hands on her hips and glared at the unenlightening murderboard. "He's pretty pleased that she's dead. But he has an alibi. And if he had killed her…I don't think that guy would have staged something as elaborate as drugging her and then bleeding her to death through surgical tubing."

"Yeah, he'd probably just have hit her with a rock," Castle agreed sullenly.

"Or shot her, as he took such pains to explain." She sighed, turning away from the baffling assemblage of dead ends, and took her seat. "I'll confirm where he was during the time of death zone. Guys," to Ryan and Esposito, "did any surveillance camera footage of the crime scene ever turn up? Or even of Krimsonn that night, since that's the last place she was seen alive?"

"Yeah, we're working on that," Ryan explained. "It's taken longer than usual to get the footage, but the problem's not on our end. I'll call around, see what's holding things up."

"Thanks, Ryan."

"I'll finish up the paperwork from last night," Esposito told his partner over his shoulder as he headed back to their desks.

"What do you need me to do?"

Beckett looked around for some task to give Castle. After a moment, her gaze fell on the in-house mailroom envelope, which still contained Steph's password-unprotected laptop. "Why don't you take a look through her computer, see if anything turns up in her email or Internet history?"

"Great!" he replied cheerfully, sliding the small laptop onto his knees and getting it started up. "Maybe I'll even find Taylor."

She was busy tracking down the contact information for Walton's alibi, but not so busy that she couldn't agree that "That would be good."

For the next few minutes, Beckett went through the motions of talking to people who just about remembered the man under suspicion, when pressed. If any more evidence pointed to him, she would have had to spend much more time on it, and if need be would come back to the witnesses who were establishing, much to her disappointment, that Brian Walton had had nothing to do with Steph's murder. Beside her, Castle's fingers raced over the keyboard as he navigated Steph's computer, tracing her activities and looking over the things she'd been interested in before she was violently killed. Careful to maintain the appearance of looking into the middle distance where all phone calls are located when not looking at her notes from earlier, she managed to watch him work out of the corner of her eye. Kate Beckett wasn't willing to admit it to anyone just yet, except perhaps Lanie during a girls' night out, but she did enjoy watching him use that fantastic imagination and creativity of his, especially when he was having fun, learning something new, and putting it to good use. She loved her work anyway, but it was much more…interesting…when he was a part of it.

Although if anyone had asked directly, she probably would have denied it. And most of the people who knew enough to ask would know that she was lying.

"Surveillance cams are in," Ryan called across the intervening space at one point. "Still no idea if there's anything useful in it all."

She waved acknowledgement as she finished talking to the taxi driver who had delivered a legally intoxicated Brian Walton to his apartment door right in the middle of their kill zone. "Send me some of it," she started to say, "and I'll take a look."

Castle interrupted. "Oh my God. Beckett? I know who Taylor is." He looked up from the laptop screen, scanning the murderboard. "I know who Taylor is," he repeated.

"Well?" she demanded, spinning her chair around and nudging his shin with her shoe not _quite_ hard enough to be a kick. "Are you going to tell us who he is, or do you have to explain how you got there first?"

He looked pitifully at her, and not because his shin hurt. "But it's so terribly clever…You see," he continued, because Beckett had expected the story above the facts, "Steph was keeping a secret from her friends. I think she was thinking about getting involved with someone outside her circle, so she gave him a code name so no one could find out her secret before she was ready to tell them."

"That's why her friends don't know who Taylor is," agreed Beckett, slightly impatiently. She knew this.

"I looked at her email account first, but there's no one in her contacts named Taylor—and if she was going to code-name someone, you'd want to be consistent, especially considering how close her friends were to her. I bet some of them had access to this computer. Then I started to go through her Internet history, and I noticed that she downloaded a lot of music."

"So?"

"She kept all of it on here! I ran a search through the files for 'Taylor'. Turns out there are a bunch of artists named Taylor, especially if you download _everything_ like Steph did. I came up with a bunch of Taylor Swift songs, of course…" He scrolled down the display. "James Taylor, Taylor Dayne, Taylor Greenwood, Taylor Momsen…and then you get into song titles."

"Castle," said Beckett, who would be happy to talk about music with Castle if they weren't trying to solve a case, but was running out of patience. "The point."

"That is the point," he said sincerely. "I only found two songs with 'Taylor' in the title: something called 'Taylor Was a Good Girl', which I've never heard before, and then the song she named her Taylor after: 'Taylor the Latte Boy'."

Beckett had _just_ mentioned Krimsonn, the coffee shop Steph had frequented, so the two men who had been the Slayer's late-working friends sprang immediately to mind. "'Taylor the Latte Boy'," she repeated as her mind spun. "He even said it!" She couldn't immediately recall their names off-hand, but one of them—Martin, that was it—had reacted especially strongly to the news of Steph's murder, and the other—Kevin—had told them that Martin had carried a torch for the young woman.

"I want Martin Bulis in here _right now_," Beckett said, snatching up the keys for the cruiser. "Well spotted, Castle. Let's go get him."

* * *

**Disclaimer:** I've had 'Taylor the Latte Boy' stuck in my head for something like seven blasted years now. I can't stand the song. It's not _my_ fault a bunch of girls decided to sing it in chorus—to a guy named Taylor who I think all of them had a crush on—at a band performance the one year I was in high school band. About time I finally got to put it to work.

**And:** Okay, what _else_ was I supposed to name a chapter where THE plot point hinged on a song?

**Next Chapter:** And probably the last. Which is sort of a spoiler for the question: Is Castle right? (Oh go on, tell me you don't check the time every time Beckett arrests someone. "Is it him? Well…it's 9:15, so, no. How about her? 9:30. Probably not. 9:56? Almost definitely.") Instead, we consider the questions of motive, evidence, and strange statuary.


	8. Chapter 8: Poof! You're Dead

**Chapter Eight: Poof! You're Dead**

**Author's Note:** SURPRISE! I lied! (It's apparently all the rage these days; expect to see lies recur as a theme. I shall utilize _retrospective foreshadowing_, and before all you English majors hit me for inventing meaningless literary analysis themes, Arthur Conan Doyle did it long before I did.) This is not the last chapter. At this point I have no idea what chapter it is. Except, obviously, Chapter Eight. This was _going_ to be the last chapter, by a different title, but the minute I submitted Chapter Seven all sorts of ideas and scenes popped into my head and practically wrote themselves. Also, Buffy hasn't gotten to hit anyone all story long, and no one has had to run anywhere, and that's clearly _just not on_. **In unrelated news**, there's an obvious _X-Files_ joke in here, and a less obvious _Doctor Who_ one, which I feel justified including because both shows alluded to the former and I always like sneaky references to the latter.

I haven't done a **Disclaimer** in a while, so: If I owned "Castle", locking Castle and Beckett in rooms together, frequently evading death together, and handcuffing them to each other would have more effect than it clearly has so far. If I owned "Buffy", then…hm…I would have kept Tara. And I would invite sci-fi/fantasy/comics conventions to my hometown more often. As the All-Powerful Owner of the…never mind.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

As they rode the elevator down to the parking garage, Castle looked over at Beckett, who was visibly fuming. "Are you all right?" he asked tentatively. "We needed a lead, and we've gotten one…so why aren't you happy?"

She sighed. "No, it's a good lead, Castle, it's just that I should have seen it sooner. Lanie even told us—Steph was poisoned with a drug that can be ground up and mixed into food _or drink_. Martin Bulis even told us that Steph often came by and bought a drink from Krimsonn around closing time. That's 11 PM. I looked over Lanie's report last night, and she said the drug would have taken about two hours to weaken her to the point where she could be overpowered by a regular human. That's around 1 AM."

"Right before our kill zone," Castle agreed.

"Right, so half an hour later—where Lanie placed that kill zone—she'd be well and truly" Beckett remembered the word Leesha and Perrin had used, and finished "moxied."

He pulled a face. "I gather they're up and around at all hours, so she must have gotten used to drinking coffee that late at night. It had always been fine before, so why would she worry about that one particular latte? Except…I wonder what went wrong between them? So very wrong that he felt he had to kill her over it."

About to reply, something suddenly occurred to Beckett. "I should have paid more attention to his alibi. A midnight movie theatre? That's like an alibi _mill_. Sitting with a bunch of other people in the dark, people get up, people sit back down, people spill drinks, and still everyone's focused on the screen rather than the other people in the room. But buy a ticket and you're confirmed at that place for all that time. Maybe there's a back door."

She whipped out her cell phone as the lift doors opened on the underground garage, which was cool and dim even in the late afternoon light that trickled down the exit ramp, despite the fluorescent lights that dotted the ceiling.

"Ryan?" she said to the phone, leading the way to her assigned cruiser. "It's me. I need more surveillance camera footage…From the Angelica…It's a theatre, Ryan. Head over there and see if they've got any cameras that still have records from Tuesday night…Yeah, during our kill zone. Yeah, that's right. No, starting after 11:30."

"Back doors," Castle reminded her.

She shooed him off like an inquisitive fly. "Also, I want you to identify any exits that aren't the front door and probably weren't being watched by anyone…Movie ticket alibi. Yeah, I know."

"Um, Beckett?" He reached out and touched her arm, bringing her to a stop. Beckett followed his gaze as Ryan said something else, but her attention was no longer on the man on the other end of the line.

"That's great, Ryan," she said absently to whatever it was he had said. "Hold that thought."

Leesha was waiting for them, sitting on the hood of one of the cruisers and combing her fingers absently through her short hair in what looked like an increasingly agitated tic.

"Hello, Leesha," Beckett greeted her warily. "What are you doing here…and why is it that Slayers seem to think that they have backstage passes to a police precinct?"

Leesha opened her mouth to answer that last question, thought better of it, and closed her mouth again before resuming with, "I just wanted to know if you had any more clues yet. And if there was anything I could do." It sounded like she'd made that up on the spur of the moment.

"When we have something definitive, I'll tell you, I promise," said the detective. "But not until then. I'm not going to tell you about every false lead and scrap of evidence in an active murder investigation. That's not how the police do things—it's not how I do things."

The little Slayer crossed her arms stubbornly. "Uh huh." She didn't sound convinced.

"And if you're planning to sit there on that car until I talk to you, go ahead. It's not mine."

"You know what, Detective," Leesha said hostilely, unfolding her arms and pointing an aggressive finger at her, "you lie real good. Your partner here," She pointed the first finger of her other hand at Castle, and added, "not so good. You know _some_thing, it's all over his face."

"I suspect something, Leesha, it's not the same thing."

"So why won't you tell me?" the Slayer growled as Beckett's phone rang, echoing strangely in the cavernous garage.

The detective decided to take the high road and ignored her, walking away from Leesha and Castle alike as she answered her phone.

"You know, if you don't start sharing with us, all the helpiness is going to go away real fast!" Leesha yelled after her. Not only did Beckett not turn around and acknowledge her, she put a finger in her free ear and devoted her attention more fully to the phone.

"Helpiness?" Castle repeated incredulously. He couldn't have stopped himself for anything.

"What?" said Leesha, treating him to a confused look. "Did I say that?"

He nodded solemnly, taking advantage of her disorientation to sit down on the other side of the anonymous police cruiser that Leesha was frequenting.

She winced. "Sorry. I've clearly spent too much time listening to Buffy the last couple of days. _How_ she can be one of the most dangerous women the world has ever known and _still_ sound like a concussed valley girl is beyond me. Stop me if I do that again, all right?"

"You don't actually like her very much, do you?" the writer concluded, surprised. He hadn't known Buffy for very long, but he'd liked her—once they got past the shouting and death threats, of course.

"Oops. Does it show?"

"A little bit."

Leesha chewed on her bottom lip. "Well, she already knows that about me. I guess I don't _dis_like her, but she's driving me_ crazy_. She's exhausting to be around and insists on doing everything her own way, even if that means breaking rules that anyone in their right mind understands are there for a reason—even if they're rules that she made! And she expects to be in charge of anything she's involved with, even if she's completely out of her territory and doesn't have a clue how things work around here. She doesn't even know her way around the streets! If we weren't all working together and keeping someone with her always she'd probably get lost and get hit by a car!"

"As I understand it," Castle joked, "poor car."

The little Slayer made a strange noise somewhere between a laugh and a hiccup. "Yeah," she admitted, "good point." She sighed, stretching her arms behind her and leaning back almost to the car's windshield. Castle hoped no one came down wanting to use the vehicle.

"I should probably apologize to Beckett, shouldn't I?" she admitted. "It's not really her fault—although I would like to know more about what's going on in the land of the nice normal human investigation—I'd just forgotten how irritating working with Buffy can be."

"So why does everyone listen to her?" Castle asked curiously.

Leesha tipped her head on one side, eying him up. "Well…if you ever tell her this, I will hunt you down and hurt you, and you know I can…because she's the best there is at what she does. A lot of us Second Age Slayers treat being one like a hobby; running around the streets hunting monsters is something we do—but then we go home and to school and have jobs."

"But not her?" Castle prompted, remembering that Leesha was inclined to make speeches if given a clear field and an audience.

Shaking her head, Leesha agreed, "Buffy's been at this so long I don't think she even knows how to do anything else. She can't live in the mundane world properly anymore; everything she's about is tied in with being a Slayer. I know I just said that she's exhausting, but that's just working with her. I can't imagine how exhausting it is to actually _be_ her. She just never _stops_—or if she does, I haven't seen it. But then we don't get along very well and I doubt she'd admit it to me if she did."

As Leesha finished her sentence, Beckett returned to them, weaving her way amongst the cars easily. "Come on, Castle," she called, "unless you're thinking of taking up being a hood ornament as well as a writer and an amateur sleuth."

"If I'm going to be an amateur sleuth, I need a hat," he teased back as he got up off the car hood. "I'm thinking fedora. Don't you think I'd look good in a fedora? What do you think, Leesha?"

Leesha blinked in the Morse code of confusion, taken aback at being consulted. To his disappointment, Beckett was not nearly so flustered. "Wear it at your next Halloween party and we'll find out."

"Can I wear it to the Precinct on Halloween?"

"That depends. If you walk in the door and I want to shoot it, then no. Leesha, go home."

"But I want—"

Beckett put a hand up, stopping her mid-sentence. "All right. I'll tell you what—right now, we're just going to investigate a lead. If we confirm it's worth investigating further, I'll call you guys. Until then, tell everyone that there's to be no more sitting on police cars and reading my files and taking over my desk. Got it?"

Leesha nodded meekly. "You call us, okay? We want to help."

"Okay. I'll let you know. Now go home," she repeated patiently.

As Leesha slumped off towards the entryway, Castle asked, "What was the phone call about?"

"Esposito's been looking through the surveillance footage we already had. He's found two people moving towards our crime scene—one of the traffic cameras nearby picked them up. One of them is definitely Steph, but the other is too indistinct to identify." She got in the car Leesha had been sitting on—it was her cruiser—and Castle joined her. "He's also confirmed that Steph left Krimsonn at the time our witnesses said she did, and that the two employees we interviewed also left when they said they did, and were walking together when they left the camera's field of vision. But that doesn't tell us much, because the one man's apartment is in the same general direction as the Angelica. Esposito's put an alert out on Bulis anyway, so maybe we'll get lucky and someone will walk into him. What was the matter with Leesha?"

"I think," mused Castle, blinking in the afternoon light as they accelerated out onto the street, "that she wanted to come and work with us for a while. Or with anyone else who isn't Buffy. They don't seem to like each other very much, and if Leesha learned something that no one else knew, she would have an excuse to take the lead."

"Usually when people connected to a homicide spend so much time checking up on the police, we start looking at them as a suspect, but I don't think that's a likely outcome in this case. But at least one of them has acknowledged that this might actually be the police's case to solve."

* * *

Beckett was not terribly surprised when, having arrived at Krimsonn, Martin Bulis was nowhere to be seen. Now, it was possible that there were any number of non-incriminating reasons for this, but when she asked the current manager if he was scheduled to come to work today, she was told that the day before yesterday, Bulis had asked for time off to attend his friend Steph's funeral and had not been seen since.

"She hasn't been buried yet, has she?" Castle asked rhetorically. That was certainly suspicious behavior.

His partner shook her head no; Steph's body was still in the morgue under Lanie's care. Calmly, she requested his phone number from their records, and after a moment, the manager decided that there was no harm in releasing that information to the police.

She dialed. It rang repeatedly before going to an automated voicemail box, and she left a terse but noncommittal message before hanging up.

"I'll also need his home address, and any next-of-kin or emergency contacts you have on file," Beckett requested firmly, which the manager also gave up after being reminded that one's place of residence was firmly in the public domain and the police would be very grateful if he, the manager, would save her a little time and effort.

She had been as polite as possible, but Beckett realized that the manager might have felt a little bullied at this point, so as the sun set, she and Castle headed back out to the unmarked police cruiser, once again parked a few blocks away, to make more phone calls. Police work really involved more time spent on the phone than the general public realized, she remarked in passing to Castle as they walked and it got progressively darker, except for a few stray glints off mirrored upper-story windows.

He promised to put lots of phone calls in his next book, just for her.

When they got there, she handed him her notebook so he could plug the address into the built-in GPS, an activity Castle always enjoyed doing. The result was somewhat of a surprise.

"That's a nice neighborhood," she commented, taken aback. The display was showing her a map of a suburban, single-family development. "How can he afford that?"

Castle immediately resorted to his smartphone in hopes of finding something to tell her about the place, while Beckett fell back on the all-reliable Esposito, presuming Ryan was still off investigating the Angelica to disprove Bulis' movie-ticket alibi.

"Espo, I need you to run financials on a Martin Bulis, spelled—"

"_Like this guy on the board here?"_ Esposito interrupted her.

She'd forgotten that she'd taken the time to move his picture and name to the 'suspect' column of her murderboard. "That's the one. While you're at it, look up this address…" She read it out to him, to the accompaniment of faint dry-erase marker squeaks as he wrote it down on the whiteboard. "…and find out how he can afford to live there.

"_Will do, Beckett,"_ he confirmed cheerfully. _"Don't go away."_

Castle held his smartphone out to her. "Look, it's quite pretty," he said. "Very suburban. That's a bit of a commute, though. Does he have a car?"

Beckett duly looked at the picture displayed on the screen, and added to Esposito, "And check vehicle registrations too."

A minute and a half later, she put Esposito on speakerphone so he could share his results with them both. _"Financials will take a little longer, but as to the house—he doesn't own it," _the detective informed them._ "Place is registered to a Matthew Bulis, age 37, unmarried, no kids."_

"That's his brother," said Castle, who had retained Beckett's notebook and was looking at the 'next-of-kin' entry. "Sure is a lot older."

"_Bulis the elder works for Apple—yeah, that Apple—and has for some time, by the looks of things, so maybe he lets his little brother stay with him instead of making the kid pay for a second place."_

"Right, if the brother owns the place, I'll call him; see if we can get permission to search without having to get a warrant from a judge."

"_And Bulis the younger does own a car,"_ Esposito added before she hung up. _"Red Honda Civic."_ He read out the license plate. _"Previously registered to, guess who, Matthew Bulis." _

"Kid sure has a lot of hand-me-downs from Big Bro the Businessman," commented Castle. "Maybe he started resenting people who he thought were better than him somehow."

"_Better hope not, bro. That could include a whole lot of people,"_ said Esposito before Beckett hung up on him.

As she dialed, Beckett asked, "Anything else about the house, Castle?"

"Not unless you want to know what school district it's in."

"No thanks." And, to the phone a moment later, "Mr. Bulis? I'm Detective Kate Beckett from the NYPD." She glanced at Castle, signaling him not to interrupt.

"_NYPD?"_ asked Matthew Bulis. His voice crackled oddly over the phone. _"Did I hear that right? This is an international connection."_

"Yes, sir. NYPD."

"_What's this about? Was my house broken into? My office?"_

"No, sir," Beckett said with infinite patience. "Do you have a brother named Martin?"

"_Yes, of course. What's happened to him?"_

"I'd like to find that out, Mr. Bulis. A friend of his was murdered earlier this week, and now Martin has gone missing as well—"

"_What? Since when?"_

"He was last seen two days ago, and due to his connection to our homicide victim, we'd like to find him as soon as possible."

She never once mentioned that Martin was the prime suspect in that homicide, while simultaneously telling the absolute truth. Castle was, once again, impressed. He was often impressed by her, but Beckett was the best at dealing with all the people who became involved with a homicide investigation, whether they were next-of-kin, suspects, witnesses, or legal representation. He was pretty sure he'd never get tired of watching her.

"_I haven't heard from Martin since I left New York three weeks ago. What can I do to help?"_ asked Matthew Bulis.

"Does your brother live with you at this address?" she checked, reading from her notebook, which Castle held out to her. When he had confirmed that, she added, "I'd like to enter and search it for any clues to his whereabouts. Do I have your permission to do so?"

"_Yes, of course,"_ he agreed unhesitatingly. _"Do I need to fax something to your headquarters, or can I just give you permission over the phone?"_

"That should be enough. My partner is listening in and can bear witness if need be."

"_There's someone else there? Hello, Detective."_

Castle grinned, pleased at the misidentification. "Hello, Mr. Bulis," he said simply, neither confirming nor denying the man's assumption.

Beckett raised an amused eyebrow at him, but let it pass. "Thank you, sir. We'll inform you as soon as there are any definitive developments regarding your brother."

"_Thank you, Detective,"_ Bulis said sincerely through the crackle of international phone lines. _"There's a rock wall around my house, and there should be a spare key behind a loose rock. You're welcome to use it, but please put it back when you leave. I'm away on business and not due back in the States for another month, but if there's anything else I can do to help by being there, please don't hesitate to call me."_

"I understand, Mr. Bulis. We'll let you know." She pushed the button to close the line.

"Smoothly done," he complimented her.

"Thanks, Castle." She put the car in gear and busied herself looking for a break in traffic that she could slot the cruiser into. "Ask the GPS how to get there, would you?"

He pushed buttons obligingly even as he asked, "Wait a second, aren't we going to call the Slayers and tell them we're going to search his house?"

Beckett's reply was immediate. "No."

"But you told Leesha…"

"I lied. It happens." He didn't understand, and the look on his face said as much, so she tried to explain. "Castle, people say they want to be informed of everything, but what they really want is—and you should know this—a story. With a beginning, a middle, and an end, and _one_ guilty party. Not suspect after suspect who _might_ be the one. But a neat and understandable chain of events that we can only give them _after_ the case is closed."

Besides, she really didn't like other people coming in from outside and trying to interfere with the way she worked her cases, regardless of whether they were taking over—like the FBI agents on the Nikki Heat bullet murders last year—or getting in the way—like Castle the first year they'd worked together, until they'd learned to work with each other rather than against.

"They're gonna be mad," said writer warned, but made no move to pick up anyone's phone and call them himself.

"Not if we solve it before they realize," she assured him. "And not if we find Martin Bulis."

* * *

Despite Castle's faithful GPS programming, they still managed to get lost twice on their way to Matthew and Martin Bulis' residence, and it was well and truly dark by the time Beckett pulled the police cruiser up to the front of the pleasantly nondescript suburban house, which was graced by two stories, a large tree reaching up and over the peaked roof, and a low stone wall that ran around the borders of the property.

"Um," said Castle, looking out the window as they parked. "Beckett…"

They had not gotten there first. In the car's headlights and the intermittent streetlights, he could see that the entryway to the house in question was full of people, most of whom he recognized, who had apparently set up shop to wait for them. He was also willing to bet that they had arrived in the miniature fleet of incredibly varied cars that had parked haphazardly along the street.

Perrin was sprawled out elegantly across the concrete of the driveway, which was probably still warm from the late afternoon sun. She was wearing a pair of earphones, which were attached to the iPod sitting on her chest. Next to her, a young, chocolate-skinned man Castle had never seen before was doodling on that same concrete with a pencil, decorating every surface in reach with an array of swirls and abstract shapes that flowed into each other. He had another pencil tucked behind his ear, where it vanished into a long mane of tight curls.

Danielle, Steph's close friend and apparent post-mortem representative, was also there, sitting against the garage with her legs tucked up close to her body. Her hands were clenched tightly in front of said legs, unlike those of the teenage girl beside her, who appeared to be painting her nails. Glints from the car's headlights, sweeping across the scene, showed that she'd been there long enough to already finish the nails on her other hand.

Leesha had been pacing back and forth as they drew up, but she stopped and placed her back against the tree as they approached, glaring into the headlights. On one of the tree branches above her, animal eyes reflected the red-eye of sudden flash photography. At least, Castle hoped it was the lights that made those eyes glow red. As he considered that, a woman who had to be in her early thirties emerged from behind the tree and joined Leesha in staring at the car.

Yet another young woman, this one with hair so bright red it shone even in the half-light of the streetlamps, sat in the half-hearted lawn to the side of the driveway, picking at the grass that surrounded her and tearing it to shreds one blade at a time. Unlike the rest of the odd convention of people, she did not look up in response to the car, keeping her attention on meticulously shredding the lawn.

_Seven_, Castle counted involuntarily, eight if the animal in the tree was actually not an animal, and…

He definitely recognized Buffy, who had claimed the low stone wall for herself. She sat with one knee pulled up to her chest, the other hanging over the side of the wall, and her back against her vampire companion Spike, who Castle had last seen from a distance at the Old Haunt but never spoken to. He watched the car approach and stop with a look of faintly sardonic amusement; she leapt down the moment it came to a halt and headed towards Beckett and Castle as if confronting a pair of children who'd been throwing rocks at walls.

That made ten people (possibly), Castle counted, and he and Beckett made it a round dozen. Although the odd assortment of people _might_ have escaped notice in the heart of Manhattan at a music or outdoor theatre festival, out here in the suburbs they looked utterly mad. "How did they know?" he asked Beckett rhetorically.

"I have no idea," she said grimly, opening her door and meeting Buffy halfway. Perrin pocketed her iPod and earphones, and joined Leesha in clustering around Beckett in protest.

"What are you all doing here?" the detective demanded. "Who are all these people?"

"They're with us," Buffy answered. "You can tell _them_ to go home, if you like, but I'm pretty sure they won't do it." Clearly Leesha, despite whatever problem she had dealing with Buffy, was not afraid to carry tales back.

Beckett looked around and decided not to erode what little authority she had by issuing orders that were never going to be obeyed. "How did you know to come here?" she asked again, a little more calmly.

Perrin pointed at the young man sitting in the center of his drawings. "Santiago's a far-seer," she claimed.

"I'm not actually that good at it, though," he called to them, correcting his friend cheerfully. "I can't hear anything, just see, and I have to know what I'm looking for."

In absence of evidence to the contrary, and in presence of all these people where they shouldn't have known to be, Castle decided to believe this claim, and hurriedly brainstormed all the places Santiago could have seen this address written down. "…The murderboard!" he said after a moment's frantic thought. "You've been watching the murderboard! And Esposito wrote this place down on the board earlier, remember, Beckett?"

She remembered, but was too annoyed to appreciate his perception.

"It's a great idea, Detective," Santiago assured her, tucking the pencil away behind his other ear. "Very organized."

"And I imagine you want to help search this house," Beckett said flatly.

"We're going to," Leesha confirmed. She was not asking for permission. "I mean, we _waited_ for you, because we're actually _trying_ to work with you guys."

"And you don't know what you're looking for," added Perrin. "Look around you, Detective—you're surrounded by people who do."

"Willow got back to me about that statue thing," Buffy told her. "No one who has something like that has just _one_."

Castle wanted to ask, "So what was it?" but didn't get a chance, because the argument was still going on.

The lead Slayer continued, "You need us, 'cause once you walk in there—" She flipped her thumb back over her shoulder in the direction of the house. "—you're walking out of your world and into ours."

"Th' lady's right," something called from the tree branch where Castle had seen glowing eyes earlier. "Sings in there. Quiet for now, though."

Beckett was clearly exerting every ounce of her self-control to firstly, not look up at the tree, and secondly, not ask what _sings in there_ meant. "Do I have a choice about this?" she asked reluctantly.

"No," said pretty much everyone there.

"You could try," someone new said. Castle's eyes jerked around looking for the source of the faintly British accent and settled on the bleached-blond vampire Spike, who had at some point while no one was watching him moved from sitting on the wall to leaning against it. He grinned unnervingly. "That might be fun to watch."

Buffy flicked her fingers at him familiarly in a gesture that looked a lot like _shoo!_ but didn't have that effect in any way whatsoever. She never looked away from Beckett, so perhaps she hadn't expected it to. "Well?" the Slayer demanded.

The detective sighed slightly, rolled her eyes as if seeing inspiration from the streetlamps, and said, "All right. But—" she added, because there had been a great standing up and moving around at her words, "I am in charge of this search, do you all understand? You do as I say; you play by my rules. Those are the conditions."

She looked around and saw that more explanations were required. "I'm a detective and I have to obey the law, and right now the law says that only I and the people working for me to solve this case are allowed to go into this house. So you are all temporarily working for me, and that means you have to pay attention and do as I say."

Everyone Castle didn't know looked at the Slayers. They must have seen some sort of agreement, because gradually nods spread throughout the strange assembly.

"Well, I'm glad that's settled," said Castle. Everyone looked at him as if they'd forgotten he was there. "Can we go inside and turn on some lights now?"

"First, I want everyone to understand the rules," Beckett announced to her new deputies. "No one touch anything. That means you too, Castle. If I have to get fingerprints from here later, I don't want to waste time sorting out everyone here. Understood?"

"I don't have fingerprints," said the Voice in the Tree. Beckett ignored it.

"Secondly, if you find something you think is important, come and tell me. You can tell everyone else what you found too, but I need to know about it. Don't tell them—" She pointed in the general direction of the Slayers, although her plan was foiled by the fact that they had all moved from where they'd been standing a minute ago. "And not tell me," she went on, undeterred.

"You're in charge, right," said the teenage girl, shaking her fingers to dry the nails. "We get it. Your partner's right; can we go inside now?"

"Yes," she conceded. "Look around; the owner said there was a spare key in a loose rock in the wall. Has anyone seen it?"

"Boring," the teenager declared. She snapped her newly painted fingers at the door and said something that utterly bypassed Beckett's brain and went straight to her bones by way of the ears. They rang all over her body.

And the door audibly clicked open.

"_Ho_lly," Santiago moaned as complaint.

"Ouch," someone else agreed.

"Couldn't you have focused that a little bit?" the slightly older woman scolded her.

Holly looked unrepentant. "It worked, didn't it?"

Beckett wisely decided to bypass this little squabble and accept the gift of an open door. As she reached the threshold, the Voice in the Tree stopped her with a hurried, "Wait a second!"

She stopped and looked up at it. Red eyes in a body that was faintly feline glowed back at her. "Lights should be safe," it said after a moment. "'Ware booby traps, though."

"Thank you," she said, ignoring the Alice-in-Wonderland-ness of talking to a catlike thing in a tree, and switched on the first set of lights she found.

The entryway of the house lit up, and the detective was instantly surrounded by a mass of people hurrying to join her. To avoid being trampled, she moved further into the house, turning on lights as she went.

It illuminated a big, nice suburban house, with a staircase that led directly from the entry hall to a second story. Santiago and Perrin immediately headed up it to explore the second floor.

Castle, meanwhile, had avoided the stampede by staying outside rather than moving further in. He did plan on joining his partner in there, but felt he could wait a moment while she corralled her new recruits. As such, he was the only one that saw the little pantomime that involved the open door.

Buffy had also not joined the stampede to the house. Instead, she had stayed in the driveway, watching the others argue and mill around, although she'd winced with everyone else when Holly decided that keys were boring and unfocused magic was more interesting. As lights flickered on all over the house, she stood arguing in an undertone with Spike.

Aware that he was eavesdropping shamelessly, Castle nevertheless couldn't hear a word of what they were saying, but if they didn't want to be overheard, they shouldn't be so obviously secretive. As it turned out, he was too obviously interested himself.

"What?" Buffy asked sharply, glancing over her shoulder at Castle. He found himself fixed on the end of two sharp stares.

"Don't mind me, I'm a nosy person," he said instantly. He couldn't remember where he'd heard that, but it sounded good.

She rolled her eyes. Castle was becoming quite the connoisseur of that gesture, and she was almost as good at as Beckett. "We're trying to figure out if he was actually invited in or not," she explained. "The rules are sort of complicated, and I don't know them all."

"No one knows them all," Spike told her, in what sounded like an ongoing argument. "It works or it doesn't, and you don't find out until it has."

"That's actually true?" Castle had to know. "That, um, vampires have to be invited into a residence before they can go into it?"

"Right," he said. "But then it keeps working. You know, you really do look like Caleb. It's a good thing she saw you first."

Castle had no doubt that 'she' referred to Buffy and that if Spike had been the first one to see him, without knowing he was Castle and not Caleb, the writer would not have gotten out of it so alive. "So I've been told," he said simply. "And why don't you just try? Everyone got stuck in the doorway anyway, but they've mostly moved now."

They had, so he headed towards the door to find Beckett and make sure she hadn't succumbed to the atmosphere of arguments that he could already feel developing. Behind him, he could hear Buffy say, "Told you so," dismissively to her partner.

Once inside, he quickly found Beckett, who had set up a command post in the living room and was fielding reports from people. "What have we got so far?" he asked her, looking over an array of things that had been spread out across the glass-topped coffee table.

Before she could begin to answer, a jagged blue line sparked across the wall and then fizzled out, leaving no trace of its brief existence but a smell of burnt steak. "What was that?" Castle yelped.

"Booby trap!" someone—the woman in her thirties whose name he still hadn't learned—yelled from the kitchen. "Disarmed now."

"Any more of those?" he asked her, taking a few steps backward so that he could see into the kitchen. "I'm Rick Castle, by the way, who are you?"

"Call me Jessie. Nice to meet you."

"As in Jessica?" he asked.

"Jessamine, but definitely don't call me that. Radinka says this house is laced with them; Bulis must have activated them when he left 'cause you can't live in a house like this. Step on the wrong tile—or pick up the wrong spoon, in the case of the one I just turned off—and zap!"

"Okay," Castle said patiently, resolving to ask more questions even if he didn't understand the answers. "Now which of you is Radinka?"

"That's me!" yelled the Voice in the Tree, now coming from upstairs. "And if your next question is 'what are you?' I am _going_ to bite you! 'Cause I'm not! It's temporary!"

"She hopes," muttered Jessie, winked at Castle, and returned to opening drawers with hands wrapped in fabric.

Back in the living room, Santiago was adding to Beckett's tabletop collection of possibly relevant stuff, although exactly how relevant shards of brown pottery were Castle wasn't exactly sure. "There's a lot of space upstairs, but we found Martin's bedroom—clearly belongs to a younger brother. I found these; I think they're part of that statue."

"Yes, they are," Buffy interrupted, appearing from behind Castle to take them from him before Beckett could. "Now that I know what it was meant to be, this fits right in."

"So what—" Castle began to ask before being interrupted again.

"Beckett, we found it!" Leesha yelled as she came down the stairs at slightly less than the speed of sound. Castle, having never seen a Slayer in action, was impressed that she didn't fall down them instead. Dashing around the corner as another blue-lightning booby trap sparked itself to death, the little Slayer proffered a medicine bottle wrapped in Kleenex.

The detective managed to grab this piece of evidence before Buffy could. "Prescribed to Matthew Bulis, two months ago. Zanaflex, 30 capsules…active ingredient, tizanadine," she read.

"Moxie," Leesha corrected her.

"It's empty," Beckett pointed out, shaking the bottle slightly.

Leesha shook her head pityingly. "Well, yeah. Went into _Steph_!"

"Thank you, Leesha." The detective put it, still Kleenex-wrapped, onto the coffee table, before meeting Buffy's eyes and pointing sternly at the collection of statue fragments she held, and then down at the table. The older Slayer relinquished them with good grace.

Yet another booby-trap went off harmlessly, making everyone jump. "How many of those things are there?" Jessie yelled from the kitchen. A moment later, the back door opened and Danielle stepped in.

"I think there's something buried out here," she said. "And I don't think it was ever alive, but does someone want to come out and check just in case it rises from the grave?"

"I instantly don't want to go out there," said Castle. Leesha laughed, patted him on the shoulder even though she had to stand on tiptoe to do so properly, and followed Danielle back outside.

Perrin came halfway down the stairs to talk to Beckett. "Got books," she said briefly. "Gloves please?"

Pulling a pair of crime scene gloves from a jacket pocket, the detective handed them up to the Slayer. "That's my last pair," she warned. "Don't melt them again."

"What?" Castle said in desperate curiosity, as the usually dignified Perrin grinned and muttered, "Sorry…" before heading back upstairs. Beckett shrugged in response to his question before looking at him and, to his surprise, smiling a real smile. "What?" he repeated.

"This is just Christmas morning for you, isn't it, Castle?" she asked rhetorically. "It's all over your face."

He hadn't known that. "The world is secretly much more incredible than I knew it was," he told her. "Isn't that amazing?"

"Most of it in here _is_ trying to kill you," pointed out Spike, who had _once again_ turned up somewhere without Castle noticing. Apparently Beckett's drafting everyone in sight as her deputies with permission to enter the house had indeed possessed enough validity to let him past the front door.

"How do you do that?" the writer couldn't help muttering.

"You get used to it," Buffy called from another room. "Actually, no, you don't, so I just assume that he's _always_ going to turn up."

Beckett laughed again. "You should see yourself, Castle," she chuckled. "Grinning like all your dreams have come true."

"I shall," he announced, finding a hallway mirror and taking a look at the expression on his face. It was, as she said, an ear-to-ear, wide-eyed grin. It was a playing-laser-tag-at-the-loft sort of expression; it was a finding-a-secret-passage expression, a treasure-buried-in-a-graveyard-and-Beckett-just-hugged-me expression. All of which had happened recently, so there was precedent.

There was also, he happened to notice, something in the mirror that wasn't on the wall behind it.

"Beckett…" he called, and then, remembering that there were experts around, "…Also Buffy, if you're there."

"What is it, Castle?" his partner asked, abandoning her collection of evidence in the living room to join him in the hallway.

"What's _that_ doing there?" he asked, pointing to the shimmering pattern of symbols on the wall behind them—but only in the mirror. When he turned his head slightly to look at the actual wall, there was nothing there.

"I have no idea," Beckett said frankly. "But it's very pretty."

"For something invisible," he agreed. "Why's it just in the mirror?"

They stared at it together for a few moments.

"It's moving," Beckett said placidly. "See?"

"Shiny," Castle agreed.

Somewhere very far away, they could hear someone shouting something that sounded sort of like, "Don't look! Hey! Castle! _Beckett_!"

If either of them had been in any condition to pay attention to the real world, they would have seen Buffy, who just then moved on to grabbing Castle by the shoulder and shaking him, an action that got most people's attention even when it wasn't being done by a Slayer, who could shake really hard. It wasn't working; they both still stared at the sigil in the mirror, which was visibly accumulating power by the second.

She had responded to Castle's call for help and found both him and Beckett ensnared by—she glanced at it out of the corner of her eye, and only for a second at a time before looking away again—something that looked incredibly like—

Her thoughts were interrupted by a violently bright flash from the mirror, encompassing the trapped Castle and Beckett—and Buffy, who was touching Castle as well. The last thing she felt before it engulfed her was the sensation of inhumanly cool fingers wrapping around her wrist.

* * *

—a transfer spell, Buffy's thought finished somewhere else.

For the moment, all she could say about the somewhere else was that it was really dark. Then more things gradually occurred to her as her mind put itself back together. Colors flashed in her vision, but they were probably just an aftereffect of the bright flash that had brought her to the pitch dark rather than anything real.

So much for vision. She moved on to feeling. Well, her head really hurt. She was standing up. It wasn't cold as much as a place that had probably never been warm in its entire existence. And there was space around her, except on her left, where she was well aware of the presence of her mate. Also, she'd know his hand in hers anywhere.

It didn't smell very good, Buffy observed. Sort of stale. Actually sort of really stale. And that was all she wanted to say about that. After the abject failure of smell, she really didn't want to taste anything here.

As for hearing…mostly she could hear Castle and Beckett, who were audibly not happy.

"What just happened?" Castle moaned from closer to the floor. "Don't feel so good."

Beckett picked up the refrain. "Oh, God…where are we?"

"Transfer spell," Spike said shortly. "How could you _possibly_ not know that was a trap? Considering the house was full of them?"

"Don't feel so good," Castle repeated, as if this would possibly elicit some sympathy.

It didn't. "Do we know where we are?" Buffy asked, turning her head reflexively and uselessly to where she knew Spike was.

"Too dark even for me," he told her. "Hold on."

She heard fabric rustling, and then the familiar _click!_ of a lighter. A moment later, they could see each other, although not very much further than that. Automatically, they checked each other over visually, looking for wounds. Neither of them was hurt, so they turned their mutual attention to Castle and Beckett, who had not weathered the transition quite so well.

"Stand up," Buffy told them. "It's cold on that floor; you'll feel better when it's just your shoes on it."

"Just a minute," groused Beckett, "Headache's going away."

Now that Beckett mentioned it, Buffy's own headache had already vanished. She was so used to being in pain one way or another that she hadn't even noticed it go. That probably said something about her, but Buffy was frankly too busy to worry about it.

"Don't police carry flashlights?" she pestered Beckett.

The detective groaned. "Okay, okay." She clambered to her feet awkwardly, and turned to help Castle up. He'd gotten the full force of the spell for the longest time and was still squinting his eyes against even the tiny glow of the lighter.

After a minute of digging in pockets, the detective managed to find and turn on a small handheld flashlight. As small as it was, it overwhelmed the lighter completely, which Spike turned off and pocketed again.

"I feel better now," Castle announced belatedly. He stared around at the stone walls and branching tunnels that the flashlight revealed close to and suggested further away. "Where are we? And how did we get here? Did you seriously say 'transfer spell'? That…is actually really cool. If it weren't for the headache and the flashing purple aftereffects. Those are aftereffects, right?"

"Keep up, Castle," Buffy scolded.

Beckett was turning in a slow circle, getting as clear a picture of their surroundings as possible. "All right, that's somewhat better. Where are we, does anyone know?"

"Secret underground alien-infested catacombs of Antarctica!" said Castle as instantly as possible, considering all the syllables in that phrase.

"What?" said everyone else.

"Aw," Castle sighed the way he did when no one got his jokes.

"Yeah, he's feeling better," Beckett shrugged. "Any real answers?"

"I think we're in the subways," Spike volunteered after a moment. "And not the ones you lot use, either. The old ones. I've used them before, last time I was in New York. It's not a bad way of getting around during the daytime. They go everywhere."

"I know I'm going to regret asking this, but when was that?" Castle asked.

"1979, I think. And worse…this must be really far down." Before anyone could ask the obvious question of 'how do you know?' he added, "The air's not good, and it smells far down. I never came down this far."

Buffy flinched slightly. "Tell me that's because there's nothing interesting down here?"

"Yeah. I wish."

Something was nagging at Beckett, something small but important. Like all things you can't quite remember, it was utterly out of her reach—and then she got it. "At the beginning of this case, Castle and I talked to Leesha and Perrin about what Steph had been doing lately." She trailed off uncertainly as if unsure if it was a question or not.

"And?" Buffy asked.

"One of them—Perrin, I think—said she and Steph had gone down to clear out 'something in the subways', and that they won…but it had friends."

"Was that 'is there something down here?' Detective?" Spike asked mockingly. "Oh yes. There's always plenty of something down here. The only question is what's going to find us first?"

That echoed.

"And is there a way out?" Castle asked.

That echoed too.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Yeah. Plottiness happened. We spent most of the story so far in Castle-and-Beckett world; now we're down quite literally in the underworld. Stay tuned.

* * *

**Public Service Announcement:** _**They've fixed the review button. It no longer hurts to use it. You should try it out.**_

_No, but seriously!_ All 24 of you lovely people who have this story on story alert and haven't reviewed should become FANTASTIC people and do so. At a loss for words? Answer any and all of the following questions, which I put to my beta-reader on a regular basis: What am I doing right? What made you laugh? What can I do better? Can you hear the characters talking and/or are they believable? And: What do you expect to happen next?


	9. Chapter 9: In the Dark

**Chapter Nine: In the Dark**

**Author's Note:** I know, I know…not _technically_ a BtVS title. But as Buffy herself pointed out a couple chapters ago, if the rules aren't working for you, change 'em. And it was really too apt to pass up. (And anyway, the episode title I was going to appropriate under my own self-imposed rule has been reassigned to probably Chapter Eleven. Having said that, don't ask me about Chapter Ten.)

**Personal Note:** You guys. You rock. You do. Just saying. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed this story—you know who you are, and more importantly, so do I—and everyone who has added it to story alerts and/or favorites. I like to think I'm a halfway decent writer, but hearing it from you makes me very happy.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

Back on the surface, decisions were being made by the traditional method of yelling at cross-purposes until a conclusion was reached. Luckily, the people remaining in Matthew and Martin Bulis' house were better equipped to deal with the situation of four of their number suddenly vanishing than almost anyone else in the city.

As variations on "What the hell just happened?" erupted throughout the house, Jessie was the first to sum up recent events.

"Look at this," she called out, immediately noticing the blackened remnants of the transport spell that had etched themselves into the wall opposite the mirror. "This wasn't here before."

She was rapidly contradicted by Leesha, who had just returned from the backyard to yell, entirely belatedly, "Don't look at that!"

"I think it's dead," the woman reassured her. Leesha did not look reassured. "It's burned out, see? No life left in it at all." So confident of this conclusion was Jessie that she reached up to tap it with a finger. Flakes of scorched paint fell off onto her hand.

Leesha glared. "Some help that is. What did it _do_? And _please_ tell me they're alive, 'cause if we have to tell the NYPD that we lost two of their detectives _and_ report back to Stockbridge that Buffy got herself killed on our turf, I don't want to be here. They'll be really pissed. All of them."

As she was speaking, they were joined by Holly, who, convinced that there were secret compartments somewhere in the structure of the house, had been magically scanning every wall she came across for more evidence against Martin Bulis. Apparently she hadn't gotten to this wall yet.

"Wow," was her first response. "He's better than I thought. In a really, really nasty way."

Holly was one of Leesha's longtime friends, through a chain of family connections that looked unnecessarily complex when laid out. She had been Leesha's favorite cousin's best friend's older sister, and although Holly was much younger than the then-newly minted Slayer, they had been great friends until cousin Conner had been killed by a vampire. After that, Leesha had gone to Stockbridge to get the training that she'd initially turned down, not knowing that it could have saved her cousin later, while Holly had developed an interest in magic that had unlocked her natural talent for the art. When the Slayer had returned to New York, she had naturally sought out her old friend.

Only this long association—and long practice—now kept her from slapping the teenage girl in frustration. Also, Slayers either lost that impulse or they started hurting people they otherwise liked. "Holly," she said with forced calm. "What is it? What happened to them?"

Obviously something of her frustration had leaked through, because Holly took half a step backwards before edging around the seething Leesha to look at the scorched design more closely. "Under all the _exploded_, it looks like a teleportation spell," she explained, tracing the blackened wall with one finger without actually touching it. "This is really advanced stuff. I could maybe draw this, but I don't think I could get it started, much less lock it in to be triggered later. And it is burnt out. Otherwise it would be moving and glowing. Also we'd all have been zapped away by now."

She looked around at the gathering crowd. "Who did it get?" asked Holly, mentally totting up Perrin, who was standing on a stair landing peering over the rail at them, Danielle, who had followed Leesha inside and was hovering around Beckett's table of evidence, and Radinka, who was perched on the back of a couch, tail twitching slightly with interest.

"Buffy and Beckett and Castle," Leesha told her, having made the same count and assuming that Santiago was with Perrin—he usually was—and that Bridget, the quiet redhead who had been a friend of Steph, would be upstairs engrossed in the books that the other Slayer's upstairs team had found.

Perrin made her own count and came up one person short—and with Buffy elsewhere, she urgently wanted to know where he was. "Has anyone seen Spike? With all the shouting, I'm surprised he hasn't turned up to see what's going on."

Entirely involuntarily, Leesha's teeth started grinding. Having failed to throw the vampire out of her New York territory the other night at the Old Haunt, she'd been pointedly ignoring him all evening, to the point where even though she was sure he'd disappeared with his Slayer mate, she'd left him out of the tally of missing people. "Well, as he's _not_ here demanding to know what's happened to Buffy, that thing probably caught him too. Watch me not care," she couldn't help but add.

"Before you ask, I don't know where it went," Holly anticipated as Leesha turned back to her. "There's not a whole lot left, just enough for me to see the teleportation elements of it. It was cloaked when it was active and it exploded when it was triggered. This—" She pointed at what was left on the wall. "—is just scorching. In fact…" The teenager rubbed her fingers across the blackened wall. "Hey, Radinka? Does this smell funny to you?"

One of the benefits to Radinka's involuntary transformation, which she had insisted was temporary for almost a year now, was an increased sensitivity of smell. She sniffed at the fingers Holly came over to present to her, wrinkling her red-furred muzzle in dislike. "Accelerant of some sort," she confirmed. "Smells almost like Sharpie—that paint stripper sort of smell? Take it away before I lose brain cells."

"That's what I thought," Holly said with more confidence. "This looks like a death curse, but it's not. It was burnt into the wall when the power stored in the first spell went off and lit the whatever chemical this is, probably to cover the actual transfer spell. Which I can't get at, so don't ask. Did I mention the 'burnt'? I'm gonna go wash my hands now."

"So they're not here," summed up Perrin, "and we can't go after them because we don't know where to go, but they're alive?"

Holly stopped on her way to a nearby bathroom and shrugged. "Unless it was set to transport them to the bottom of the ocean or somewhere equally nasty. If I was going to set this up and didn't care who it got, I'd set it for, like, solid rock. Save me the trouble of calibrating it."

Someone made a sick noise.

"Holly?" said Leesha, and when the teenager leaned back out of the bathroom doorway to give her attention to her Slayer friend, added, "Let me be the scary one, okay?"

In any other context, this might have sounded ridiculous coming from a five-foot-two twenty-year-old woman who might have weighed a hundred and ten pounds in big boots, but everyone in the house knew better.

"I'm going to assume it sent them somewhere safe and they got there alive," Jessie decided. It might have been her who had made the noise—the confidence sounded forced. "What should we do now, Leesha?"

"Well, I'm going back upstairs," interrupted Perrin before the smaller Slayer could get a word in. "Maybe Santiago can find them, although if he doesn't know where to look he probably won't be able to just find them by taking snapshots at random. And I'll check on Bridget." Before she headed back up the stairs, however, she leaned further over the railing and asked in a stage whisper, "Does she _ever_ talk?"

Danielle and Bridget had both answered to Steph, so it was Danielle who replied that she only did "When she has something to say. She remembers everything she reads, so if there's something important in those books, she'll find out."

"Let's take this house apart," declared Leesha, annoyed at being upstaged by Perrin. This was a common state of affairs, and Leesha would be happier when this case was closed and they could go back to only speaking to each other on alternate weekends by getting various friends to carry messages for them. "Find out what we can, and then we'll take Beckett's evidence back to her base for her Scoobies to look at so she can arrest Martin Bulis when she gets back from wherever she is."

In the absence of Beckett, the 'no one is to touch anything' rule was utterly abandoned. To be fair, they hadn't been following it much even when she had been there, so her absence was probably not the defining factor.

* * *

Beckett's pocket flashlight wasn't illuminating very much of the abandoned subway system. Even though the alternative was pitch blackness, it was creating more shifting shadows than lit space.

"I hope you changed the battery in that flashlight recently," Castle said. She glared at him.

"Two weeks ago recent enough for you, Castle? I've only used it once since then."

The writer surveyed their little patch of light. They stood at the intersection of two tunnels, forming a T-shaped junction made of old brick. There was no way to tell what color the bricks had been originally, as they were largely covered with a black mold that was probably the main contributor to the stale smell. Rubble lay scattered around, and although Castle was willing to believe that there were subway stations and tunnels under Manhattan that hadn't been opened up for almost a century—he'd reread a rather good thriller about them not long ago—he felt obliged to point out that this was not one of them.

"It's too small," he explained when his three companions all looked as if they were going to object to his analysis. "You couldn't run a subway through here, at least not one I'd want to be on. Maybe a train set. But look." Castle stood on his toes and reached up; Beckett obligingly pointed the flashlight at him. He was the tallest person currently standing there, and his fingers didn't quite reach the ceiling. But then, he didn't want them to. That mold was on the roof as well.

"So what's your theory, then?" Buffy asked. She'd been venturing into the intersecting tunnel, stopping every other step to see if there were any identifying marks or indicators of which way they should go. She didn't look too terribly unhappy about coming back.

"Well, I'm sure it's part of the subway system," Castle amended. "I think you're right about that." This he addressed directly to Spike, who'd followed Buffy into the other tunnel to keep an eye out for anything that might attack them.

"But I think it's a service tunnel. It's meant to have people in it, anyway. There aren't any rails on the floor. Or on the ceiling."

"This helps how, exactly?" the vampire asked, in the tones of one not really expecting an answer.

"Uh…at least it's not a sewer."

"That would be better. Because sewers always let out somewhere so they won't back up," Spike had to explain. "These subways were _sealed_."

"All right, that's enough," Beckett interrupted them before they could descend into a meaningless argument born mostly of frayed nerves. "We need to decide which tunnel to take to get us out of here, not write up their history."

"Are your cell phones working?" asked Buffy. "Mine's broken. Again. Something you don't have the faintest idea what it is swung a sword at the pocket I was keeping it in."

She took the flashlight from Beckett as the detective and the writer checked their phones. "No signal," Castle reported immediately, and, a moment or two later, "But my Angry Birds app still works."

"Yeah, that'll be very helpful. When we're attacked, you play annoying music at them. Really could have done without you lot inventing that thing."

Beckett had a rather more useful comment. "I don't have a signal either, but my phone has a built-in flashlight. Castle's should, too. I don't know how long the phone batteries will last, but we can use them until then, although if I need to draw my weapon I won't be able to hold a light as well. If that happens, I need everyone to stay behind me so I can shoot without worrying about hitting any of you."

At this, something occurred to Buffy. "I've got a better idea, Detective," she said, handing back the flashlight and fiddling with the sheath that held her knife at the small of her back. "Hold on a sec." Her lips moved as if she were counting off numbers or items, fingers moving over the flat leather sleeve.

"We don't celebrate my birthday anymore," she said, apparently randomly. "Something bad always happens when we try. Things explode, fights start, demons lock us all in a house for two days with another demon that can melt into walls and stab people…stuff like that."

Castle and Beckett had no idea what she was talking about or why, but Spike had evidently followed her train of thought. "Not the sunlight one," he told her.

"Used that one up last month. You know that, you were there. My point is," she said to the other two, "family still gives me gifts, but they're sneaky about it. Last year, Willow who is like my sister rigged up a bunch of spells that don't take any magic to release, because she said I'd need them if she wasn't around." She pulled a short, slender, flimsy-looking length of metal from the framework of the sheath at her back. "Hands-free light source. It'll follow us and be brighter than a cell phone flashlight."

"That's a needle," Castle objected. Curious, he reached out for it, and to his great surprise, Buffy let him take it. Upon closer inspection, it may have been a needle in a previous life, but in the light of Beckett's flashlight he could see that tiny symbols had been engraved or embossed onto it.

"Only works once—which is why I'm _sure_ it's not the sunlight one," she added as an aside, "but if I tell Will what a wonderful idea it was, I'm sure she'll replace it."

Castle had just been transported from a house in suburban New York City that had been riddled with invisible magic booby traps to the forgotten subway tunnels of Manhattan, alongside a warrior woman and a vampire—not to mention Beckett, who at this point in the case was usually objecting that this sort of thing didn't happen in the real world—so by this point he was willing to believe in magic needles. "How do you turn it on?"

"Magic words," Buffy grinned, taking it back from him.

"Abracadabra?" he guessed.

"No," she sighed, and then added, "_Willow was right_."

In her open palm, the needle blazed brightly, blurred into a glowing spherical ball of energy, and floated upwards to hover above their heads. It was much brighter than the flashlight, and the small group could now see that one of the three possible routes was blocked off, and the other began a gradual but regular downwards slope.

"That is _very cool_," said Castle sincerely as they started into the remaining tunnel.

Beckett was also very impressed, but she had some concerns. "Won't something so bright attract the attention of everything down here?"

"What, the blazing light? Or the insanely obvious flare of power that goes off whenever Willow tries to do small magics? Hopefully," Spike chuckled grimly.

"_Hopefully?_" yelped Castle.

Buffy grinned back at him, magic light bobbling frantically as it tried to follow her. "Keep up, Castle."

"I missed something again, didn't I?"

"You want to attract attention," said Beckett. It was not a question.

"Well, go on, Detective. Explain it to him."

Spike, Beckett thought, was giving her more credit than she was due. Except she was already reasonably sure he never did that, so maybe he was just teasing her. "If something that lives down here comes to see what's going on…" she thought through it aloud, "even if it's unfriendly…"

"Everything down here is unfriendly," confirmed Buffy. "I don't even know what's all down here, but I know it hates me and wants to eat you. Probably doesn't like him very much either."

"And you're sure that's not going to be a problem, right?" asked Castle, a bit nervously.

Now that she was absolutely sure he wasn't an evil ghost from her past, Buffy seemed to be finding him very amusing. "Between the two of us, we're not quite invincible, but we'll put a lot of holes in anything feels like testing that."

"What was the last thing we lost a fight to?"

"Each other, mostly."

Ahead, the tunnel branched in two, and they stopped for a moment. Beckett was still reasoning through their strange behavior, and didn't attempt to affect the choice to take the left turn. Instead, she decided to drop to the back of the group and draw her gun, just in case they were being followed, and let the people who lived in this world on a regular basis take the lead. Back up on the surface, when she'd attempted to take command of everyone who'd turned up to search the Bulis house, she'd made a speech about police work being her area of expertise and being in charge. She had no doubt that, had there been an equally large group down here to settle the issue with, she would have been on the receiving end of a similar speech, and it would have ended with Buffy in charge of everyone around.

There had been no need for it. Beckett was, she was perfectly willing to admit, out of her depth. To extend the metaphor, she could paddle around and keep her head above water, but she wasn't going to win any medals for diving in.

"Anything that lives down here knows its way around better than we do—oh. You can't honestly expect the first creature we run into to actually _help_ you…can you?"

"Of course not," said Buffy, a little bit smugly. "We'll have to kill some things first before the rest get the idea. But I'll kill everything down here if I have to, Kate. I hate being underground. Bad things happen to me underground. I don't want to be here—and they don't want me here _either_."

Castle got it. But he didn't like it. There was entirely too much potential for damage, despite the odd pair's confidence. Maybe they did know what they were doing, but he'd never seen them fight and wasn't sure how much to believe of what he'd been told. "Why are we going this way?" he asked instead.

The Slayer ignored the question, which meant that it had been Spike's idea. "Air smelled better."

"That's the plan, then?" the writer pestered. "Follow the air, wait to be attacked, hope whatever comes after us is in a talkative and helpful mood?"

"You got another one?"

He didn't.

"Then that's the plan," Buffy said decisively.

* * *

They made it almost five minutes before Castle came up with something else to talk about.

"That statue," he asked. "The broken one we keep finding pieces of."

"What about it?"

"That's my question."

Buffy missed a step, momentarily confused, before figuring out what he'd meant. "You mean, what is it, where does it come from, why does it matter, why was Steph killed because of it?"

"Yeah. All of that."

"I'd like to know that too," said Beckett quietly, although her voice was clearly audible since there were only four sources of noise in the immediate vicinity. "Especially if I'm going to arrest someone on the evidence of it. The statue was connected to Steph's murder, then?"

A few more feet of tunnel went by while the Slayer thought about it. "It's a long story," she said finally. "Maybe the longest story."

"Oh, well now I've _gotta_ know!" said Castle, who knew a narrative hook even when the speaker didn't.

"Can't it wait for sometime less dangerous? When we're not waiting to be attacked from every side?"

"We're in a tunnel, pet," Spike couldn't help pointing out. "There aren't sides. There's front, and there's back."

Buffy's version of the Death Stare worked on everyone, except the one person she turned it on most often. It didn't have any effect this time either.

Castle persisted. "Actually, this seems like the perfect time. No one's phone is going to ring, we're not doing anything else but walking—and anyway, if we're trying to get attacked, shouldn't we seem as distracted as possible?"

Rather than answering him directly, she drew her knife from its sheath and held it ready in her hand, preparing for that attack. "I'll start at the very beginning, so don't ask me to explain why I'm telling you bits that sound like myths. They are myths, but they're important. And when we do get attacked, get out of the way fast, all right?"

Hoping that summed up to 'all right, I will explain', Castle nodded. "Can I ask questions?" he requested. She nodded.

They walked for a few seconds more, taking another turning apparently at random. Castle hoped they weren't getting even more lost, although he couldn't see how they could have been more lost than they already were. He put that concern aside, however, as the Slayer began telling the story she'd promised.

"Wayback in the dawnatime, before the First Age," she started, words echoing slightly in the tunnels, "humans didn't exist. With me so far?"

"Okay," he agreed.

"Instead, there were demons. Before you ask, 'demon' just means anything that isn't human, but can think and talk. Some of them are more unfriendly than others, some are more powerful, some look human, some can if they want to, some sort of do, and some don't at all."

"Got it. Demon is a catchall word for anything not human."

"Well, not _everything_," she pointed out. "If it can't think, it's a monster. That's the difference. Although we say _monster_ when we're insulting demons, too."

Made sense to Castle. "Just like humans. Demons think, monsters don't. Both of them existed before humans. Right?"

"Uh huh."

By now, Beckett had decided to listen, stay quiet, and keep watch back the way they'd come. She was a detective. She believed in evidence. She was unwilling to venture into the realms of comparative demonology, although she was willing to believe in Slayers, who were, in her experience, wonderfully realistic women who had a practical, problem-solving based outlook on life.

"One of the earliest demons, we say 'pure demons', were incredibly powerful. They were just spirit. No bodies at all. Like smoke on the air. They killed each other, and they killed everything else, and that was the way things were."

"How do you know?" Castle asked.

"I've been there," she said softly. "I saw it. The earth at the beginning of the First Age."

Well, there was nothing you could say to that.

"The First Age is the age of humans," she explained. "Humans appeared on the earth, and the pure demons hunted and killed them instead of each other. Big snacktime, humans all over the menu. Then they got nasty and started moving themselves into the bodies of human dead for their very own, and on top of that they got through to other dimensions and brought other demons to the earth. It wasn't even a war."

Castle got the feeling that he was being directed to ask the right questions, but he asked them anyway. "Then why are we still here?"

"Well, someone wasn't listening," Buffy said teasingly. If this had started out as a myth, anything written down had been long since abandoned. So either this could be how she always told stories, or she was more nervous than she was willing to show and was talking to cover it up. This last seemed most likely. He didn't know what she associated with being trapped underground, but based on the words 'trapped' and 'underground', he doubted it was all good memories.

"You just didn't know it was important. Well, neither did I. At the beginning of the First Age, humans were toast. Except they didn't have toast. Something burnt, anyway." She ignored Spike's less than helpful contribution of "Barbecue!" and went on. "They couldn't fight back. They figured out some magic, which was much more all over the place back then. And when that wasn't enough, they thought of something else. They knew a demon could be sealed inside a human, 'cause the demons had been doing it to themselves. That's where we get vampires, by the way. Still is."

He seemed to be asking "Really?" a lot, but he asked it again.

"Everyone knows that," Spike took it on himself to answer, looking back over his shoulder from further up ahead. "Half the crap writers in the last century knew that." He generally let Buffy do the talking to humans, but rarely hesitated to interrupt, correct, and just plain argue whenever an opportunity turned up. They'd had entire snarling arguments on the margins of otherwise reasonable conversations.

"Less of 'em now, though," Buffy agreed with him before turning back to Castle. "Anyway, wayback then, they trapped one of the pure demons and imprisoned it within a living woman."

"Okay, I remember you mentioning it now, but I can't say you actually told me this story," the writer remembered, fascinated. He could almost forget that he was walking through an abandoned tunnel that didn't smell very good, waiting for the bait of a magical floating light to be taken by an unspecified something that would violently attack them. Since he couldn't do anything about that, he decided to focus on the story instead. "You said I'd roll my eyes if you told me Slayers were created 'by magic'."

"You would have. But yeah. The demon energy was sealed inside her, and she got all its power—strength, speed, endurance, healing—for her own. It drove her quite mad, though," she added sadly. "She couldn't even remember her name; she still can't."

He had to stop her again. "You can't mean this woman is still alive!"

"Of course not. If there's one thing Slayers do reliably, it's die." She paused. "That was not my point."

But it had been true. Castle could hear the truth in her voice.

"She shows up in dreams and visions sometimes. Utterly 'round the bend. Can just about talk if you don't make her use long words. But when she died, that power passed to another woman, and another after that, and so on until recently. First it ended up in me, and then the Master of Vampires managed to drown me, of all things, so it went on to an excellent girl named Kendra who I quite liked, actually. But Kendra died during the Gang Wars and Faith was called instead. Then Willow rewrote the spell from the inside out four years ago so there could be lots of us all at once."

Still guarding their backs, Beckett was growing impatient with what was, to her, a fairy tale. "It's an interesting story, Buffy, but I'm afraid I don't see the point. What does a millennia-old legend have to do with a murder committed last week?"

The Slayer didn't seem particularly offended by Beckett's disbelief, so the sharp tone in her voice was probably due to the fact that she thought she had explained and everyone else had missed the point entirely. "It _matters_ because it's a story any of us will tell to pretty much anyone who will listen. I mean, I have stories I won't tell to anyone—even people who already know them."

A little way ahead of them, Castle could clearly hear Spike laugh. Obviously he knew some of these stories, and was probably in a few.

He couldn't swear to it, but he rather suspected Buffy was blushing ever so slightly as she went on, "That broken statue was a statue of one of those ancient pure demons. They were all destroyed or banished thousands of years ago, but I learned a long time ago that images have power. Apparently it's one of the basic something or others of magic. Or so I'm told. According to Willow, who knows what she's talking about, if someone knew what he was doing, he could use it to call one of those pure demons back from wherever they went. Not all of them were killed. Some of them were just sent somewhere else."

Going along with it, Beckett asked, "Why would anyone do that?"

"Well," she shrugged, "think about it. You're Martin Bulis. You're bored, working in a boring job, learning powerful magic, 'cause you're bored, and still living with your older brother. If we had a week to spare I'd tell you about all the bored people I've had to deal with who started dabbling and got out of control. All of them were bad news. Destruction and chaos, all over. Most of them killed people. Lots of them ended up dead themselves. I've been doing this for…" She paused for a moment to count. "Almost twelve years now? Damn. And I only know _one_ that survived—and that's 'cause we caught him and tied him to a chair for a while. And he's not really evil; he just follows whoever shouts loudest."

"Mostly he's annoying," complained Spike. "Still annoying."

Buffy agreed—but she wasn't going to let such an obvious opportunity go by. "Annoying doesn't go away," she pointed out. "_You_ still get on my nerves all the time."

Castle ignored the backchat, but he got the point. So now it was his turn to tell a story. "And then imagine that Steph walks into your life," he interrupted. Buffy let him do so. "She's powerful, pretty, doing something important, defying death and waging war on the forces of darkness, that kind of stuff. And she likes you. But you're not good enough—and you know it—until she tells you a story about how _she_ got to be good enough. And you start looking for ways to _become_ her equal."

Beckett could buy that as a motive. Especially if Steph had then rejected Martin utterly, told him he was doing something she thought of as evil but that he'd done to impress her, and then smashed his rare expensive statue that he'd spent no little time, money, and risk tracking down and learning to use.

"I think that's what happened," Buffy agreed with him. "Except there are two big problems with what he tried to do."

"You guys don't let people do that, right?"

She nodded. Castle was catching on. "That's the first problem. Even if he did it right—and that's a big if, 'cause it took three incredibly powerful shadowmages to make it work the first time—he'd still go mad, just like the First Slayer did. We like to stop people doing that if we can. If he did it wrong, he'd have released an incredibly ancient and powerful force that we know very little about into the world, where it would cause havoc and destruction and probably try to destroy the human race."

That was not a desirable outcome.

"Besides," she added, "that's already happened once this decade, so we're in no great hurry to have it happen again."

"And what's the second reason?" asked the writer, desperately wanting to ask about the first time it had happened.

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. "He'd go mad. Good enough reason for you?"

He didn't get a chance to reply, because that's when they were attacked.

* * *

Ryan had tried calling Beckett an hour and a half ago, wanting to tell her about his findings from the Angelica—there were loads of exits that weren't the front door and a grand total of one of them was covered by security cameras—but she hadn't answered. This didn't particularly worry him, as it wasn't unreasonable to think that she had it turned off for some reason or another.

It was not until he tried the call again half an hour later that he started getting concerned. She still wasn't answering, so instead he called Castle, who never turned his phone off under any circumstances and occasionally looked as if he might cry if someone was so heartless as to take it away from him. But Castle did not answer his phone either, and Ryan was subjected to Castle's latest Internet-derived idea of what constituted a voicemail message. Since he'd bothered to sit through it, he left the message he was (eventually) invited to leave, and hung up wondering where they both were and resolving to only text Castle in future until he changed the recording.

It occurred to Ryan that maybe it was his phone that wasn't working, but this theory was quickly proven wrong as Jenny chose that moment to call in. His phone was working just fine, or it would have given out at some point during his extended conversation with his fiancée.

"Hey Esposito," he leaned back in his chair to yell at his partner once Jenny and he had hung up simultaneously, "heard from Beckett or Castle lately?"

Esposito was buried in some financial records. He'd noticed that Martin Bulis seemed to be pulling an awful lot of cash out of his bank account on an irregular basis, and although there was no way to trace where that cash had gone to, Esposito was interested in finding out where it had come from in the first place. He was pretty sure that it was more than Bulis had been earning from Krimsonn, and was beginning to suspect that the extra money came from Martin's older brother Matthew. Whether these donations were voluntary or involuntary remained, as yet, a mystery.

"Not since they went off to search the Bulis house," Esposito replied absently, dividing his attention between bank statements that had been emailed to him from the bank in question, intermittent texts from Lanie, and now Ryan. "Why, what's up?"

"Been trying to call them for over half an hour now. No one's picking up."

"That's weird." This noncommittal answer was followed up, half a minute and a page of financial records later, with, "So, do we panic like lunatics or ignore comrades in peril?"

"Assuming they're not just ignoring me."

Esposito seized on this chance to tease his partner by asking, "Sure you didn't dial that seafood place again?" Three weeks ago, Ryan had accidentally scrolled past "Castle" on his cell phone contacts and called "Catfish Pier" instead, jumping the gun somewhat and talking about a traffic stop to a recorded menu that had been a little slow to start playing. No one was going to let him forget it until someone else made an equally humorous mistake.

"I did not dial the seafood place," defended Ryan tartly. "Unless the Catfish Pier replaced their takeout menu with Castle singing that "Nyan Cat" song for twenty seconds AKA _forever_."

"That'd be something." But even as he spoke, Esposito was tapping out a text message to Beckett on his own phone. Rather than listen to Castle's surprisingly on-key rendition of an extremely annoying Internet phenomenon, he chose to send Castle an identical text as well.

Some time elapsed while they waited for a response to their various messages. Around them, detectives and other 12th Precinct regulars went home for the night. The night shift came in to replace them. Ryan fetched coffee for them both, as at that point Esposito was on the phone with a bank that had apparently replaced all its employees with recordings shortly after sunset. At some time amidst all that, Captain Montgomery came over to see why they were still both at their desks and not going home like approximately half of the people in the bullpen.

"Your fiancée's going to be wondering where you are, Detective," he reminded Ryan in a friendly manner.

"Yes, sir," Ryan agreed, because that was almost always a safe answer. "We're just trying to check in with Beckett and Castle. Make sure everything's OK on their end and they're not bringing in a suspect or a body or something that'll make us have to turn around and come back. Better to be here already, y'know?"

Montgomery did know. He had also heard the worrying part of that explanation. "They're not answering their cell phones? Where the hell are they?"

"Searching a suspect's house. They got permission from the owner, who's our suspect's big brother. It's way out in the suburbs," he explained, pointing at the address still written in dry erase marker on the murderboard, "so they might be awhile."

Montgomery managed to be both a good cop and remarkably tolerant of the shenanigans of Beckett's miniature task force. He knew the perils they regularly got into, and it was because of this that he hesitated. He wanted to go home to his wife and children, but he was reasonably sure that they were as safe as a cop's family ever were. Beckett and Castle, on the other hand, needed more rescuing than any two people he'd ever known. "What can I do to help?" he asked.

"Um," said Ryan unhelpfully. Ryan wasn't even sure what he could do at this very moment, much less what his boss could do. There were plenty of courses of action they could take, but they all depended on the choice to overreact or under-react, both of which were embarrassing if you turned out to be wrong about which one to pick.

Luckily for Ryan, more information appeared at, indeed, this very moment, in the form of two people Beckett and Castle would have recognized as Jessie and Santiago. In the interests of diplomacy, they might not have understood, the increasingly confrontational Leesha and Perrin had sent one of their people each. Each of them carried a cardboard box, which building security had searched for bombs and other suspicious materials, and which actually contained evidence—or at least interesting things—taken from the Bulis house.

They recognized Esposito, Ryan, and Montgomery by the simple sign of those three hanging around Beckett's distinctive murderboard, and decided that these were the people that needed to see the things in the boxes.

"You work with Detective Beckett, right?" Jessie checked anyway, setting her box down on the desk that bore Beckett's name tag. That used up all of the remaining space on that surface, so Santiago deposited his box on Castle's usual chair instead.

"I'm Captain Montgomery, and these are Detectives Ryan and Esposito. How do you know Detective Beckett?"

Jessie gave the captain the once-over and decided to mince words. "I knew Steph; I've been helping her friends do their own investigating. We all ran into Beckett and her friend Castle at a house they was searching earlier this evening."

"These are all things she thought might be important," Santiago added, fibbing slightly. Some of them were things Beckett had never seen and the Slayers and their friends thought might be important—and some of the things that had interested them and Beckett more were not in the box.

"So where are they?" demanded Esposito. "We've been calling them; they're not answering."

Carefully, Santiago said, "We don't know. We were helping them search the house, and then they left. We don't know where they went. No one saw them go." Santiago subscribed to the Beckett School of Lying By Telling the Exact Truth.

Ryan grabbed a pair of crime-scene gloves from his jacket pocket and started sorting through the contents of the boxes as Montgomery and Esposito tried to get more information out of Jessie and Santiago.

"When was this?" the captain wanted to know.

"Maybe two hours ago?" Jessie hazarded.

"I looked for them," said Santiago honestly, but didn't specify how he had done so. Without a known location to look in, he hadn't been able to find them. His specific talent for far-seeing worked somewhat like looking up a map on a GPS or Google Maps. Actually it was nothing like that, but that was how he explained it to people when he had to. If he didn't have coordinates, he couldn't get there. He couldn't find a person by their own unique mental signature, although some people could. He happened to not be one of them. "I didn't see where they went."

Esposito caught Ryan's eye. "Panic like lunatics?" he asked rhetorically.

"Panic like lunatics," Ryan confirmed, nodding.

Montgomery had missed that part of the conversation, but he got the point. When two of your investigators went missing during a murder investigation, it was very rarely good news. He was willing to bet that this would not be one of those fortunate times.

In the grand scheme of things, specifically police work, it was always better to panic like lunatics and be proven wrong than leave your friends in danger and have bad things happen to them.

"I'll activate the tracker in Beckett's cruiser so you two can get out there and find them," the captain said decisively, heading back to his office to do so. "Until then, keep calling them. Find out where they've gone!"

* * *

**Author's Note:** My outline for this chapter now looks utterly nutty. It is graced with such pearls of eloquence of 'And stuff' as a separate item. And I still didn't manage to get in everything I planned. So: Martha and Alexis, more motive, actual police work, and a true-to-series (I hope) knockdown (pun intended) fight with a bunch of demons in the abandoned subway tunnels of Manhattan all get bumped to the next chapter. Also, maybe by then I'll have managed to get my hands back on the book on which I'm basing all my information on said tunnels. Which I totally forgot to pick up last weekend.

See you then. Stay awesome. If you haven't reviewed yet, become awesome by doing so. Remember this?

_**Public Service Announcement: They've fixed the review button. It no longer hurts to use it. You should try it out.**_

I stay up until 4 AM typing for you guys. Your input—even if it's just "nice story" or "good crossover idea"—matters to me! At a loss for words? Answer any and all of the following questions, which I put to my beta-reader on a regular basis: What am I doing right? What made you laugh? What can I do better? Can you hear the characters talking and/or are they believable? And: What do you expect to happen next?


	10. Chapter 10: Close Encounters of the M

**Chapter Ten: Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind**

**Author's Note: **In "Undead Again"—an AMAZINGLY ROLLICKINGLY FUN episode, for the record—Beckett says that if she could be a supernatural creature, she'd be Van Helsing…a vampire slayer. If I ever needed further proof that the Slayers would have adopted Beckett as a spiritual sister, I need it no more. And yes, I did pause the episode on Hulu to laugh hysterically. I like getting things right.

**For Your Information: **I deliberately made an effort to finish this chapter _before_ I watch "Always", since I strongly suspect that episode will make me want to either cry or throw things…or both simultaneously, which is detrimental to writing. I will watch it on TUESDAY when Hulu posts it online. Unfortunately, my beta-reader is inexplicably absent today, so this chapter is 100% Le'letha. I suspect he's got that AP exams stuff to worry about. Wish him luck.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

If the demons that appeared out of the darkness of the tunnel in front of them had been planning to take them by surprise, they failed to do so. Buffy had been expecting their attack from the moment she'd learned that they were deep underground, and had not dropped her guard all the time she had been talking to Castle about the reasons for Steph's murder. Although the denizens of the tunnels had been attempting to be quiet as they approached, there were too many of them to be entirely silent.

In retrospect, she admitted to herself, this might not have been a good thing.

She didn't think about what she was doing as her body moved to block the first attack and retaliate, reacting on instinct and years of training. She'd learned years ago that she didn't have to think about each punch and lunge; she could be bleeding to death, drugged and hallucinating, or utterly amnesiac, and she would still be able to fight. It was what she'd been born, chosen, and trained to do.

Some of her friends would be able to look over the demons moving to the attack and name species, traits, weaknesses, and more. Buffy generally only worried about that if she had time and, preferably, somebody else to do the research. When it mattered, all she saw were enemies, targets on their bodies that would probably hurt, disable, or kill, and movements that told her where they were going to go next and what they were going to do when they got there.

As she fought, she tossed glances back over her shoulder at Castle and Beckett, knowing that she couldn't easily stop what she was doing to protect them if necessary. This didn't throw her off much; she'd been protecting the people she patrolled with for years too. Before all her attention was taken up by the pack of attacking demons, she saw Beckett draw and aim her gun and Castle assume some sort of martial arts pose, yelling something that was probably meant to sound intimidating and only managed to sound panicked. She briefly hoped he wasn't just imitating something he had seen on TV once. From the yelling, which was only a note or two away from being screaming, it sounded like it.

All thoughts of Castle were immediately set aside as the creature putting its full weight on her arm snarled at her, its breath stinking hotly against her face. She snarled back at it—a bad habit, she had to admit—confusing it until she cleared matters up by stabbing her knife through the underside of its jaw, dragging the blade downwards through soft throat, and kicking it into its friends. The rest of that lunge went into the demon next to it, knocking it across the tunnel. She heard something snap satisfyingly.

Willow's gift was proving even more useful than either the witch or the Slayer had thought; the bright light overhead was disorienting some of the demons, which had probably not seen daylight—or anything almost as bright—in a good long while. If Buffy and her companions had been depending on flashlights, they probably would have been in a lot of trouble by now.

Granted, Beckett and Castle might have argued that they were in a lot of trouble now. And she did have no idea how many enemies she was facing, how many were left, and in most cases, what exactly they were. The only breed of demon she really recognized was the distorted features and fangs of a vampire, which promptly exploded into dust and vapor as her instincts took over and stabbed the hardened wooden blade of her knife into its chest. The close quarters of the tunnel forced something vaguely reptilian to leap at her through the dissolving vampire, a strategy that backfired immediately as she was still in the perfect position to stab it too, putting as many holes in its thick skin as she could manage in only a few seconds.

That turned out to be a little messier and a lot louder, as it screamed and flailed and hit everything in range, including her.

Buffy was forced to take a step backwards as the reptile fell almost on her feet, unintentionally giving the remaining creatures a chance to regroup. As they milled in momentary confusion, howling furiously, something that sounded remarkably like a bullet ricocheted off the tunnel wall, too close for comfort.

"_Stop_ that!" Buffy yelled unreasonably as Beckett adjusted her aim and put a nice neat hole in the front of an unlucky demon and a nasty messy hole in the back of it. Buffy didn't like guns much. She'd never learned to use one and she generally didn't like people who did.

"Not unless you've got a better idea," the detective called back, commendably calmly. She sounded fairly stressed, but that was understandable. In contrast, Castle was sounding ever more panicked as he flailed at a pair of demons who had cut him off from Beckett and were circling him in a deliberately predatory fashion. His far-too-random movements were keeping them at bay for the moment, but they were going to move in any second now.

Now that she knew Castle was one of the good guys, he was starting to remind Buffy of Xander, just a little bit, and anyway Beckett would probably be upset if Castle got eaten, so Buffy grabbed the creature that was most in her face and tossed it away, yelling, "Pull!"

She couldn't remember, right at this moment, where they'd picked that up or what it had meant in the first place. It had probably meant the same thing she meant to say now, which was along the overly wordy lines of, "I don't have time to deal with this thing that I am throwing, deal with it for me would you?"

The demon she'd thrown off balance stumbled in the general direction of Spike, who had acquired something that looked awfully like a mace from some unfortunate creature and was using it to great effect. Buffy's discarded opponent immediately folded around the weapon. It made a crunching sound that would have made anyone else wince and did make Spike laugh.

The Slayer was not even remotely about worried about him. At least one of them, she thought ruefully, was having fun; Buffy might have been too if she didn't have the detective and the writer to worry about.

Trusting Spike to cover her back as she turned on the demons attacking Castle, Buffy kicked out the knees of the bigger one before leaping to put her knife into where neck met hunched shoulders on the other. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, her boot encountered kneecap instead of joint and the demon failed to fall whatsoever.

Okay, so this thing's knees went the other way. Oops. At least it was only _relatively_ bigger; living in tunnels didn't encourage tallness. Although there had been some terribly big and nasty things that had hung out in the Sunnydale cave and sewer systems.

Castle gaped at her with something between relief and absolute terror as the creature she'd kicked roared with rage, turning on her and abandoning its attack on the writer. Ignoring him, she ducked its first blow, rolled across a floor she didn't want to think about, and came up slashing at the other demon, which was only just catching on that it was facing more than an unarmed—he was, wasn't he? she realized—mystery writer.

She briefly wished for a bigger weapon, maybe a sword, and immediately realized that she didn't have room to swing it anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the demon with the backwards knees gear up to take another swipe at her. Even if it missed, it was going to go through Castle on its way down, so she lunged past reaching arms to drive her knife into the smaller demon's shoulder. Her own arm rang as blade met bone and something cracked.

It wasn't in her body, so she didn't worry about it, wrenching the knife out of the unfortunate demon's shoulder joint and rapidly punching out into the wound she'd just inflicted, a move so rapid that she still had time to deal with the other demon.

Spinning to put herself between the limping demon and Castle, Buffy glared up at it and raised her fist meaningfully. Demon blood dripped into her sleeve, and she mentally wrote off yet another perfectly good jacket. She was always ruining them. One day someone was going to invent a fabric that didn't take stains, and when they did, she was going to replace her entire wardrobe with the stuff and never, ever, spend another perfectly good afternoon trying to get grass or mud or blood or slime (or all of the above combined) out of her clothes.

Its massive paw halfway through an arc that would have started around the ceiling and ended somewhere in either her head or Castle's rib cage, the demon apparently thought better of tangling with the Slayer and took a few steps backwards before lowering the offending limb and turning to shamble off back into whatever pit it had come from.

That was probably the plan, anyway; the side of its head exploded outwards before it could negotiate the tricky problem of wading through the now severely discouraged attackers, and a bullet embedded itself in a crack in the tunnel wall.

"I don't have enough bullets; we need to get out of here!" said Beckett, now sounding far more panicked than merely stressed, as she reloaded her gun. Her eyes were very wide.

"Seconded," Castle yelped. "Look, there!"

He was pointing at a passageway they'd walked past mere seconds before they were attacked. At the moment, there was nothing in between him and the tunnel, which was probably most of its appeal.

"We don't know what's down there," Buffy snapped at him.

"And all too well what's here! Come on!"

Castle made a dive for the side tunnel, fumbling for his cell phone and activating the flashlight app, with Beckett only a step or two behind him. "We can't stay here," the detective said quickly as she passed Buffy, "we're outnumbered!"

The Slayer muttered a word under her breath that she was fairly certain she was not meant to know. They didn't trust her, she realized. _She_ knew that between herself and Spike, they could have protected the two humans, taken down most of the creatures stupid enough to attack them, bullied whatever was left into getting them back to the surface, and then probably gone out for a drink and come back to round up and thrash whatever was left alive down here. But Beckett and Castle didn't know that, not really.

Speaking of… "Knew we were short some running away screaming," grumbled Spike, retreating to her side reluctantly as she stared down the tunnel at the flickering phone light that was Beckett and Castle. Behind him, commendably few demons were still on their feet, and some nasty fluids were beginning to creep their way downhill across the filthy tunnel floor. From the looks of things, most of it had gotten backed up in a small depression in the elderly concrete, but that was going to overflow any moment now.

"They're not actually screaming," she commented absently.

"Not _anymore_."

"We'd better go get them."

"And we were just about to win, too."

He had a point. Almost everything left in the tunnel was dead or getting there; the living had run for it. It made a very messy roadblock, but nothing that they couldn't have gotten past.

They were not immediately pursued down the new tunnel, but it did have a distinctly 'down' component that was not particularly desirable. It was only a few moments before they caught up with Beckett and Castle, who had emerged into a large, open, and above all empty space and stopped there, looking around with their flashlights. Castle's surprised shout of "Hey!" echoed off the high ceiling.

As the floating light spell followed Buffy out of the tunnel and automatically sought out the highest point in the room, they could all see that this space had once been a subway station; there were broken parts of benches scattered across the floor and structures that might have been ticket booths and turnstiles in previous lifetimes. If the walls had ever been decorated, those markings had long since been obliterated beneath dark and disgusting-looking stains that outlined strata of floods and encroaching mold.

"You do realize we're now _more_ surrounded, right?" Spike hailed them in a snarl. "And that we were _winning_?"

Castle turned around, trained the phone-turned-flashlight on the vampire, yelped, and almost dropped the phone in rapid succession. Then his brain caught up with his instincts as he figured out that the unfamiliar demonic features, wielding a bloodied mace, belonged with the familiar voice.

His first attempt at a reply ended up as more of a squawk. His second attempt actually managed to sound like "What?"

"Look around you, Castle," Buffy snapped at him. She waved at the multiple tunnels that led into this room. "We were actually safer in the tunnel. Now I don't know where they're coming from."

"Yeah, but now we're not being attacked," protested Castle.

"We ran away." As he spoke, Buffy could hear the moment her mate's features shifted back to his more human appearance; there were some sounds that just weren't suited to fangs. "What's left of that lot are going to go round up their friends, and then they're going to come back."

"Not going to take them long, either. Look." The Slayer pointed at a tunnel off to her right, where she'd seen movement in the shadows.

Beckett was the only one who didn't look. She kept her gun and her eyes trained on a tunnel off to her own right. "There too," she said shortly. "Something moved."

Castle looked between tunnels and faces anxiously. "So now what do we do?"

"Actually going to do what I say this time?"

He glared at her. "Hey, how was I supposed to know you had things 'under control'? 'Cause it really didn't look like it."

"Shut up," Spike interrupted him, and glared back when Castle took offense. "They're coming. Listen."

Everyone shut up and listened.

"I can't—" said Castle after a moment.

"I said shut up."

Castle shut up.

Nothing happened for almost two minutes. Although she was not going to admit it aloud, Buffy was starting to get worried; not by the delay, but because she was no longer confident in Beckett and Castle's ability to protect themselves. She'd fought alongside non-Slayers for years—hadn't had a choice about it for most of that time—but they'd all at least been armed, even if they hadn't always known how to use those weapons very well, and mostly there by choice. No doubt Castle could hold his own against one or two human opponents, but he wasn't used to the supernaturally violent world she lived in. Worse still, she'd heard Beckett say only a few minutes ago that she was running short of ammunition. She hoped the detective wouldn't say so again. Best to give the impression of being as armed as possible.

Three minutes. Three and a half. And then something just out of sight spoke.

"_Hellsbane_," it said. Buffy could hear fangs in the word, so she was betting on vampire.

Unsurprisingly, Castle broke the 'shut up' rule. "What's that mean?"

"That's her."

Snarking at vampires. Buffy could do that. "Hey," she purred, playing up what she'd been told was a California girl accent. "Look at that. I get any more famous, I'm gonna have to get some sunglasses and a hat."

Behind her, Castle said, "They don't work," almost involuntarily.

She rolled with it, grinning at the darkness and hopefully at the speaking demon—spokesdemon?—within it. It was a disturbing grin. She'd worked on it. It didn't have fangs, but it looked like it should. "Hear that? Guess I'll just have to kill everyone that calls me that instead. Then either nobody will recognize me, or everyone will leave me alone in case I kill them too. Whadda _you_ think?"

"Not welcome here, Hellsbane," it growled back. "Get lost."

Her jacket was already ruined, so Buffy took the opportunity to clean the blade of her knife off on the sleeve of the irreparably stained fabric. "Yeah. About that. Funny story."

Whatever it was, it wasn't amused. She could pull off the smile, but that growl was still beyond her.

"We're leaving. No problem. You guys haven't swept down here in ages. Last time I saw somewhere this messy, it was my sister's room that time she lost her favorite lipstick." A lie. Dawn's room had been slightly less chaotic, and had smelled substantially better. It had also been easier to get out of, and there had been _slightly_ fewer edged weapons. "We're just gonna wander around until we find the way back to the surface. Might take us a while, though, and whatever gets in our way next isn't going to do any better."

"I bet we run out of demons before we run out of tunnels," Spike added. He didn't sound terribly unhappy about the prospect. "Maybe the last one will finish putting up 'way out' signs before we get to 'im."

The snarl sounded more and more like a vampire. "Traitor! You're not getting out of here!"

He'd been called that before and it didn't bother him much. "Hey, we can't all be good little boys and girls who play by the rules all the time."

Buffy laughed aloud as the 'spokesdemon' practically choked itself with rage. It—almost definitely he—didn't have a comeback for that.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Beckett said quietly, clearly worried that the new plan seemed to involve pissing off as many enemies as possible. Buffy glanced back over her shoulder to check on the detective and did not like what she saw. They needed to get the humans out of here and quickly, or they wouldn't get very far at all. It was just not their world.

To be fair, it wasn't hers either, but she spent a lot of time in it.

The demons still hadn't gotten close enough to show themselves in the light, which Buffy considered a good thing. Unless they had guns or bows—unlikely in tunnels, where you couldn't get a clean shot at anything—as long as they were out of reach she and her friends were safe. Still, she kept moving, pacing back and forth by a few steps in order to keep the mouth of each tunnel in her field of view. She resolved to call Willow the minute she got back to the surface and tell her just how useful her birthday gift had been. Well, maybe the minute after she got out of a shower and got some clean clothes on.

Buffy had almost forgotten Beckett's question. "Yeah, mostly," she replied absently. A moment later, she corrected herself. "Yes. I mean, yes. We know what we're doing."

The detective didn't seem very reassured. Castle, for reasons she couldn't understand, was paging through his phone's options, the flickering light only serving to highlight how wide and panicked his eyes were. Maybe he was looking for an app that might be useful, although she doubted he'd find one. Maybe it just made him feel better. Smartphone apps were about as human as it got.

The Slayer looked back towards where the demon pack leader probably was. "Or we could do it a different way," she proposed. "You lead us out of here, and we don't come back. _Anyone_ leads us out of here, and we don't kill it, and we don't come back. Leave us down here, and we kill everything, and come back later just in case we missed anyone. _That's_ a promise."

Her words had an immediate effect, and she could hear movement and a variety of mutters, snarls, and yelps from the various tunnels that ringed the abandoned subway station. They weren't quite loud enough for her to make out the majority vote.

"Here's another promise, Hellsbane," the pack leader cursed her. "You and your friends are _not_ getting back up topside. We're gonna—"

He stopped midsentence.

"Someone disagrees," said Spike, listening intently. "Someone _really_ disagrees, wants us _gone_."

All Buffy could hear were snarls, and she said so.

"Not English. Not even a human language. Haven't heard it in a while and my accent's gonna suck, but…"

He took a few paces towards the tunnel the pack leader had been speaking from, dropping into the same demon dialect. Or at least, she assumed it was the same one; Buffy could still only hear animal snarls.

She took the opportunity he'd given her to check on Beckett and Castle. "You two all right?" she asked, looking them over. Neither of them was seriously hurt. There might be bumps and bruises hidden by their clothes, but the blood smeared across Beckett's forehead didn't seem to be hers. It had probably been transferred from her hands when she'd wiped her long hair out of her eyes. Most of the other stains were sweat and filth from the tunnel hike. They were scared, though. They probably weren't even aware that they were standing so close together; it was kind of cute.

"This is not how I expected my day to go," said Beckett softly.

A joke. That was a good sign. If Beckett were family, Buffy would make some crack about Tuesdays, but the detective wouldn't understand it, so she didn't. Besides, it wasn't even a Tuesday, although you _could_ make Tuesday jokes on other days.

"So is that, like, your name?" Castle wanted to know, and if it helped, why not? Buffy could probably physically haul him out of this underground maze if he freaked out completely and fainted or something, but she really didn't want to if she didn't have to. And she couldn't exactly contribute anything to the argument that Spike had gotten himself involved in, because she didn't understand a word of it. Hopefully he was talking at least one of the demons out there into getting them out _of_ there. So she might as well talk to Castle.

"Not really. When I was the only Slayer out there, pretty much everything I fought called me that, because it only meant me. Now that there are lots of us it's not just my name anymore. I don't know who started calling me _Hellsbane_, but it's a lot better than some of the other things I get called. It's _almost_ a compliment, I think. It's obviously caught on."

The writer almost smiled. "Dare I ask what _else_ you get called?"

She smiled back, to encourage him. "Most of it's unprintable, and some of it, like that—" She jabbed a thumb at Spike, who was still talking to the demons, a couple of which had ventured out into the very edges of the illuminated space. "—I can't pronounce. One or two of the more intelligent demons, that don't try to kill me just on automatic 'cause I'm there, have gotten ridiculously creative. There were these two a couple months ago that kept calling me the Lady of the End of Days. Wherever that came from."

"You know about that one?" said Spike, distracted into English. He put out a hand towards the other demons and turned back towards her, keeping an eye on them just in case they decided to attack anyway. "I didn't know you knew about that."

"They wouldn't shut up about it," she replied calmly, and then continued in a more teasing tone, "And now that I'm thinking about it, if I find out that _you_ are the one coming up with these names, I'm going to have to seriously reconsider whether you're still wrong or not."

"What makes you think it's me? And that's not funny. Maybe I won't get us out of here." He turned his back on her pointedly.

She had been joking. She wouldn't put it past him to go behind her back and start calling her vaguely flattering and definitely annoying nicknames, but she wasn't seriously reconsidering. He was still wrong, and at the same time, he was right, it wasn't funny. She must have been more stressed than she'd thought she was.

She was also definitely not going to explain that to Beckett and Castle. "It's an ongoing argument," she said, in response to their confused expressions.

"About what?" Castle was clearly utterly unable to take a hint. Beckett, she realized, probably could have told her that. The detective, who had understood that there wasn't much point asking, was using the short intermission to reload her gun with the ammunition she had left…just in case.

"Didn't I say? Then don't ask." They'd been having the same 'argument'—it wasn't really one—for over three years now, and she had family members who still hadn't figured out what it was about.

She'd turned to face the detectives both professional and amateur as she spoke, so the hand on her shoulder should have made her jump and, considering her training, violently attack whatever was so foolish as to sneak up on her. But she recognized Spike instinctively, and her only reaction was to look back at him and smile slightly in greeting and curiosity. Anyway, if anything unfamiliar—she didn't say dangerous, he was definitely dangerous—had gotten that close Beckett and Castle would have surely noticed.

"So do we fight our way out?" she asked.

He shrugged. "Probably. But most of them have cleared out. Anything hiding down here isn't looking for trouble. We quit following our guides and wander off the path, they'll probably go for us; we follow the rules we should be all right."

"I'm impressed," she said, half teasing. "I guess you're still wrong."

"What is he wrong about?" Castle just had to know, but Beckett was a little more focused.

"Does that mean we have a guide out of here?"

"Sort of. They're scared stupid of you, pet, so they'll only lead us out if you stay as far away from them as possible."

The latest plan of escape, as it turned out, was for their reluctant demon guides to lead the way, at a very safe distance from the next person in line. The line would be strung out to a degree that Buffy didn't like _at all_, making them very vulnerable to attack. Apparently the word was going out that a Slayer—and worse yet, the Hellsbane—was down in the subway tunnels and looking for trouble. Supposedly, most of the demons living down here would stay out of her way of their own accord, but she knew better than to rely on her reputation. After all, it was founded on things attacking her.

She didn't have a better idea, though. Wandering around in the abandoned subway tunnels at random could take forever at best and be fatal at worst. They needed to get Beckett and Castle back up to their world so they could do what they'd set out to do in the first place—catch the man who'd killed a friend and student of hers. That he'd also put them in quite a lot of danger—more than she'd admitted to the detectives—was just extra.

Assuming, of course, that they ever found him at all. Very difficult to do from a subway tunnel.

* * *

The party down in the tunnels would have been pleased to know that Ryan and Esposito were working on that. Unable to raise Beckett and Castle on their cell phones, and having learned that the patrol officers who had gone to track down the pair's department cruiser had found it unmoved, they had decided that there was only one way to find their missing comrades.

Evidently, Esposito had reasoned, Beckett and Castle had taken off in a hurry from somewhere they hadn't finished investigating. The proof of that was that they hadn't phoned in and civilians had brought in the evidence they'd gathered. So: they'd had a good reason to leave so quickly.

_Probably_, he concluded, they'd found some trace of Martin Bulis and had set off to find him as quickly as possible.

_And_, since the boxes Jessie and Santiago had delivered contained evidence and objects of interest from the house, the clues to where Bulis had gone were probably in those boxes.

_Therefore_, if they could follow the evidence in the boxes to find Martin Bulis, he and Ryan would also find Beckett and Castle.

It was an excellent and logical chain of assumptions and was almost completely wrong in every respect. He didn't know that, so Esposito and Ryan decided to work outward from that conclusion, and set to taking apart and analyzing the contents of the cardboard boxes.

Ryan wiped part of the murderboard clean and started making a list of the objects. "Empty pill bottle, prescription for tizanadine…" he wrote, and looked at the spelling doubtfully. In case he'd misspelled it, he added (moxie) next to the entry.

"Bits of pottery," Esposito added, unwrapping a paper towel full of broken ceramics. "Probably part of that other statue they've got a picture of up on the board."

_Statue bits_, Ryan copied. "What else?"

Esposito flipped through a stack of pictures. "Lots of postcards. From all over the country. It doesn't look like he has a favorite."

"Shame. Although I hope he hasn't left for another city."

"We put the APB out almost before he knew he was a suspect, bro. If he tries to get on a plane or a bus or the subway, we'll know about it."

"Yeah, maybe."

"And Beckett and Castle went after him, remember? If he was out of town they'd have called in before going that far."

"Oh right. What else?"

"Ah…a hairbrush."

"A what?"

Esposito held up, indeed, a hairbrush. "Someone's been watching too much TV," he sighed. Waving the hair-bedecked brush in Ryan's general direction, the detective explained, "DNA evidence."

"Gotcha." Ryan wrote _hairbrush_ on the board anyway.

Next up were "Packaging for lengths of surgical tubing. Much more interesting. Probably dragged out of the trash 'cause it has dried spaghetti sauce on it, but that'll wipe off. And parking tickets. Lots of parking tickets," Esposito amended, "all stamped paid."

With perfect timing, the phone rang. Seeing that his partner had his hands still buried in one of the cardboard boxes, Ryan stuck the cap back on the blue marker—Beckett got very upset when her guys let her dry-erase markers dry out—and answered it. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line for nearly thirty seconds, muttering "Uh huh," now and again, then hung up.

"Bulis' car just turned up in one of La Guardia's long-term parking lots," he said darkly, referring to one of New York's major airports. "Security cameras showed the car driving through ticket purchase at 4:39 AM, two nights ago. Paid in cash, so it didn't trigger an alert."

Esposito swore. "But he didn't try to buy a plane ticket?"

"That's the thing. If he got on a plane, he would have had to show some sort of ID."

"Could have a fake."

"Nah," Ryan decided, shaking his head. "He's not that prepared. Those friends of our vic who were here the other day? They kept saying that the police weren't meant to get involved. Anything he set up to fool an investigation is geared towards them, not us."

"Okay. So he's playing tricks."

"Airport's a bluff." Ryan was sure of it. "There are too many hoops to jump through, too many checkpoints. And like you said, Beckett would have checked in if they weren't going to stay in the city limits."

They stared at the murderboard for a minute. Esposito fidgeted with the badge he wore on a chain around his neck. Ryan picked up the dry erase marker again and capped and uncapped it rapidly, making a clicking noise.

"Tickets," said Esposito right after the minute was up.

"What?"

"_Tickets_," he insisted again. "They were all for illegal parking and I think—" He picked up the sheaf of official paper and looked again. "—they were all in the same area. Over months."

Ryan caught his drift immediately. "What's in that area that he kept going back even though he had to pay for it?"

Pulling the area up on a computer map of Manhattan, Esposito quickly plotted the various addresses where Martin Bulis had gotten parking tickets over the past year. "Not much," he said as he clicked keys. It consisted of several interconnected city blocks that had once contained storefronts. They'd all been closed down and foreclosed on by the city, which had never rebuilt or managed to sell them to any investors.

His partner peered over his shoulder, seeing something quite different. "You mean, not many people," Ryan corrected. "You know, if I was going to hide out in New York, I'd go somewhere like there. And anyway, we know this guy has a thing about abandoned buildings. If you can hide a dead body in them—"

"Why not a live one?" Esposito completed. "Good thinking, bro. Let's go check it out."

* * *

It was past midnight when Esposito and Ryan pulled up to the empty string of storefronts. It was also beginning to rain, but in a halfhearted way that suggested it wasn't going to last for very long and had only started to infuriate the people leaving clubs that hadn't packed umbrellas. Since he had made a crucial connection, Ryan had, for once, gotten to drive, although Esposito had joked that if this lead fizzled out, _he_ would be driving back to the Precinct and probably everywhere else for the rest of the month.

A couple of people were wandering down the street, but nobody seemed to be going into the derelict shops. One of the streetlights had burnt out, and the two that remained didn't do a sufficient job of lighting the area.

Ryan pulled out his flashlight and waved it questioningly; Esposito shook his head no. If Bulis was holed up here, it would be better to sneak up on him and not give him a chance to run away again. He might not be so considerate as to go somewhere where he had a history next time.

The first couple of doors they tried weren't locked, but the hinges screeched with rust when they tried to pull them open. That in itself told the two detectives that no one had entered recently, let alone on the regular basis that Martin Bulis had been frequenting the area.

The fourth door opened more readily, but after a few minutes of searching they determined that there was no one inside. There wasn't even a homeless man or woman who might be using the space as a convenient shelter from the rain. Maybe, worried Ryan, anyone inside had heard him and Esposito coming and cleared out. That didn't bode well for their chances of finding Bulis.

On their fifth search, they noticed the difference almost immediately. The air was a little fresher, as if someone had been moving through it, and the dust layers on floors and broken shelves were thinner. There were even some markings in the dirt that showed black through the greyer surfaces all around.

It wasn't a very big shop, with one open space where whatever it had sold would have been offered and a countertop that separated part of the room from the main area. Behind that countertop, a door stood ajar. As they approached, a faint light flickered, as if someone had switched a camping lantern on.

Trading looks, the two detectives approached as quietly as possible, picking up and setting down their feet carefully in order not to betray their presence by stepping on the wrong patch of floor. They coordinated their movements by eye contact, gesture, and familiarity, and rounded the buying counter without incident. Placing their backs against the wall on either side of the door, they silently consulted over their next course of action. A quick exchange of facial expressions later, the partners had decided to wait and listen.

There was definitely someone in there. They could hear the rustle of something that sounded like a potato chip bag, and the light changed slightly as someone walked in front of it. From the footsteps, it was only one person.

As they waited, a cell phone rang, surprising everyone. Ryan and Esposito managed to stay still and silent, but the resident of the back room wasn't so cautious.

"Damn it!" he swore. "Stop calling me, Kevin! Leave me alone!"

Kevin's name had been on the murderboard as a friend of Martin Bulis. Ryan and Esposito grinned at each other. If they hadn't been hiding on either side of a door in the dark, they would have traded fist-bumps of success.

The jangling ring tone petered out, and the man in the back room heaved an audibly unhappy sigh. As he let it out, the two detectives set out to make his day even worse.

"Martin Bulis?" hailed Esposito rhetorically as he shouldered the door open and strode in confidently. "NYPD." Ryan followed him in, blocking the doorway entirely.

Sitting on a camping mattress against the far wall, Martin Bulis tried to jump to his feet, shedding potato chip packets and spilling over a soda bottle, which glugged its contents out onto the floor, wiping out some old chalk marks. He no longer looked much like the DMV photograph that had been stuck to the murderboard back at the 12th; his carefully trimmed goatee-and-mustache combo clearly had not been groomed in a while and his clothes were wrinkled and worn. Most of all, he looked scared.

"W-w-w-wh-wh?" Martin got out, shaken, but Esposito was having none of that.

"Martin Bulis," he deadpanned, "you are under arrest for the murder of Stephanie Amador. You have the right to remain silent…"

As his partner read Martin his rights, Ryan allowed himself a flare of triumph before realizing that they'd only achieved one of their goals in searching this place. They'd found Martin Bulis, their prime suspect for their murder case…but where _were_ Castle and Beckett? They'd been gone far too long. If they hadn't followed the leads he and Esposito had to Martin, where had they gone? And if their partners still had to mount a rescue, where were they going to even begin?

* * *

**PSA of the Day:** JOSS WHEDON HAS DONE IT AGAIN! _The Avengers_ rocks _socks_, then runs away laughing and never gives them back. Go see it, and then go see it again like I'm going to. It's fantastic. It's epic and hilarious and awesome. It's not _The Dark Knight_, but then _Dark Knight_ transcended superhero movie and moved into some sort of 'art' category. If you judge all superhero films by it you'll never see another one (except, hopefully, _The Dark Knight Rises_). But _Avengers_ is LOADS of fun and _distinctly_ Whedon. There's this one scene…but no. You're a "Buffy" fan (or you wouldn't be reading this). You'll spot it. And probably go, "JOSS!" Aloud…yes, yes, I did, why do you ask?

**PSA of the Other Day: **Repairs to the review button proceed ahead of schedule and tests have confirmed its functionality.


	11. Chapter 11: Beneath You

**Chapter Eleven: Beneath You**

**Author's Note:** So I get time off school for the summer and have a week before I have to go back to work on a (relatively) regular basis. Does this sound like a good opportunity to write some fic? Yes! Does this sound like a better opportunity to: go see _The Avengers_ for a third time even though I keep telling myself I can't afford to see it _every_ Saturday? Read the first five books of the _John Carter of Mars_ series? Lie on the couch and see if you can watch two full seasons of _Star Trek: Enterprise_ in seven days? Yes, it does. (And for the record: yes, you can, especially if you skip that incarnation of evil "These Are the Voyages".)

ON WITH THE SHOW!

It was almost 4 AM before Castle got back to the loft. While Beckett had called the Precinct and he'd called home the moment his phone signaled that they'd come far enough through the subway tunnels to pick up a signal, lest the gang at the 12th and his family be too worried about them, Castle was not remotely surprised to find his mother and his daughter waiting up for him in the living room.

Martha and Alexis were neither talking amongst themselves nor engaged with any sort of media, simply sitting and waiting anxiously. In the fraction of a second between the door opening and that tableau changing utterly, Castle had time to wonder how many other times they had done this without him knowing: waiting and wondering and worrying whether he'd come home safely.

The emotions from that were difficult to sort out. But the moment won out and he set that thought aside for consideration at a much later and more convenient time as Alexis leapt to her feet and dashed towards him, pajama pants flapping. Priorities were priorities, after all.

"Dad!" she all but wailed. He almost dropped his key ring as she raced towards him and he threw out his arms to catch her. Hugging her back, Castle looked over her red hair to Martha, who had her eyes closed in what looked like a sigh of relief.

"What _happened_ to you?" Alexis mumbled into his shirtfront. Before he could reply, she pulled back a few inches and repeated in an entirely different tone, "No, really. What—" Her nose wrinkled, and her brow underwent the same change as she tried to figure out the nature of the stains on his clothes. "What _is_ that?"

"I suspect I do not know, neither do I want to know," he told her, disentangling her arms the rest of the way and pulling off his probably ruined jacket.

"Where have you been all night?" Martha joined in the questioning. She too ventured into Castle's sphere of odor to clasp his shoulders firmly, look him in the eye, and then pull away before the smell of his clothes could transfer itself to hers in the same way it had jumped to Alexis' bathrobe. Realizing this, Alexis hurriedly unwrapped it from her shoulders and dumped it in the overly fragrant pile that had begun with her father's jacket and had grown with the addition of his socks and button-up shirt. This left him in an undershirt that had once been a fetching shade of dark blue and a pair of pants, both of which didn't smell very good either, but would do until he could get in the shower and preferably burn what remained of his clothes.

"I'm not sure I can explain," he answered his mother's clearly heartfelt question. "Would you believe me if I told you that I've just spent—" He leaned to one side to check the oven clock in the kitchen. "—almost seven hours wandering around the forgotten abandoned subway tunnels of Manhattan?"

"From anyone else? No," drawled Martha. "From you? Anytime."

Castle made a face at her. "What if I told you I was zapped down there by a magical booby trap along with Beckett, a warrior Slayer woman, and a sort of remotely sometimes friendly vampire, and was attacked several times by demons that wanted to do terrible things to us until I fought them off with the terrible sound of that ultrasonic dog whistle app Alexis found for me?" All mostly true, except he'd only deployed the dog whistle once: while it had sent their attackers—and their guides—running with what seemed to be screaming headaches, Spike had snatched the phone out of Castle's hand and announced that if he (Castle) _ever_ did that again, he (Spike) was going to smash the device into smithereens (Castle's phrase) and use it to cut the writer into such little tiny bits that the next pack of demons that came along would be able to eat him as hot dogs (Spike's phrase).

Things had gone figuratively if not literally downhill from that point, as it turned out that Buffy had not known that Spike firstly could hear and secondly did not like the sound of dog whistles, and considered this blackmail-worthy information. She'd immediately informed them all that she was going to release that little tidbit to (apparently) everyone back home the next time she wanted something or he'd annoyed her, which seemed to happen often. Castle had found the resulting argument incomprehensible but hilarious, full of people he'd never met and references to incidents and customs he knew nothing about, and had been truly sorry when it had been interrupted by—to his delight, _much_ later—an otherwise unidentified Something Large with Tentacles.

In the walk through stepping stones of belief that is the process of telling a story, it seemed that Martha and Alexis had tripped over 'magical booby trap' and faceplanted on 'vampire', preempting any chance of getting to the Something Large with Tentacles. "Dad," scolded Alexis, "be serious."

"I thought I was," he sighed—seriously. "Okay, pumpkin. Let me go take a shower and I'll have a more believable story all ready to tell you by the time I'm done. Although—" He'd knelt to retrieve his phone from his jacket pocket, and gotten a whiff of it. "—that might be sometime in July."

Alexis collapsed back onto a couch, disappearing from view behind its cushioned back. "I'm so glad you're all right, Dad. So I'm postponing the vengeance for _scaring_ us until a later date."

"Do I at least get a warning before this vengeance occurs?"

"No. Proper revenge for scaring me is that you be scared too," said the couch.

Castle shrugged. By Revenge Logic, that was fair enough. "What about you, mother? Planning acts of terrible revenge?"

She treated him to another performance of the stinkeye she'd perfected. "You're the one who trained her in 'acts of terrible revenge'. Between your childish mind and her brilliance, I need only stand back and observe with smug satisfaction and the absolute right to say I told you so."

"Four of my favorite words."

Alexis suddenly sat back up, appearing from behind the couch cushions as rapidly as she'd vanished. "Wait! Detective Beckett was with you! Is she—"

"She's all right, Alexis. No one got hurt," he reassured her. It wasn't quite true—lots of monstery looking things had gotten hurt as the little group had slowly and frustratingly made their way towards the aboveground human world and the streets of Manhattan, and there were some bruises scattered around on their side—but it was true enough.

"Come on," he encouraged her, rounding the couch and taking her hand to pull her up from where she'd rejoined the cushions. "Showers and beds all around, little miss stinky. Isn't it a school night?"

Alexis reminded him that "No, today's Sunday," as she let herself be dragged off the couch by her wrists. "Big mister stinky-er."

She was right, he realized after a few seconds' thought while skiing her across the hardwood floor and towards the stairs. He'd bought her a new pair of special sliding socks just a few months ago for Christmas and was pleased to see that she was wearing them. He'd utterly lost track of time as the case had accelerated from impromptu conferences at the Old Haunt on Friday evening through the searching of Matthew and Martin Bulis' house that had landed Castle, Beckett, Buffy, and Spike in those damned tunnels on Saturday night.

A lot had happened in a relatively short space of time, but he was glad of it. When he and Beckett and the guys didn't have any leads or good ideas, things dragged on for days. But when a case accelerated like this one, it usually meant it was getting somewhere.

* * *

Between getting back to her own apartment and turning up at the Precinct Sunday morning, Beckett calculated that she had spent about an hour and a half in the shower trying to scrub the smell of some abandoned and some other all-too-inhabited tunnels off her skin, taking into account the shower she'd taken immediately after locking her door behind her and the one she'd taken after a few hours of sleep. So it was a clean and nice-smelling Beckett, with only slightly damp hair, who arrived at her desk to find that the boys had constructed a 'BIG HONKING EVIDENCE LIST' around the edges of her murderboard.

"Nice," she semi-sarcastically told Ryan, who grinned unapologetically—mainly because the title was in Esposito's handwriting and if she'd disapproved it wouldn't have been Ryan who caught the flak from it.

"If I'd been gone any longer, would I have found little drawings everywhere? Well done on finding Martin Bulis, by the way," Beckett added more seriously. The boys had evidently taken advantage of her absence to decorate the board to their hearts' content, as the DMV picture of Bulis that had previously been on the board had been replaced by one taken at booking and someone who wrote a lot like Ryan had written 'arrested' next to it.

"Thank you," Ryan accepted, and "Nah, Castle's the one who scribbles on the board. Where is he, anyway?"

"If he smelled half as bad as I did, probably still in the shower. We split up once we got out of the tunnels, but he promised to be here before noon."

She heard his next question coming a mile off. "What were you doing down there, anyway? Espo and I thought you'd found something at that house that told you where to find Bulis, but he was nowhere near those tunnels."

Beckett and Castle had spent some time trying to figure out how they were going to answer that question as they'd wandered in what had felt like increasingly futile circles. They hadn't come up with anything that would hold up under scrutiny—including the truth—and Buffy and Spike, while full of incredibly inventive suggestions, had not been particularly helpful, as "you got hit on the head and knocked out and dragged off and left there" had turned into "hypnotized by secret agents and you don't remember" and then "hiding from zombies". Castle had not helped either by telling the pair that they'd already tried out 'abducted by aliens' on Captain Montgomery and he hadn't gone for it.

The Beckett School of Lying, however, instructed her to tell the truth as much as possible while simultaneously revealing as little actual information as she could, so she simply went with: "It's a long story, Ryan, and not particularly relevant to the case." Before he could persist, she changed the subject (another precept of the Beckett School of Lying, although she wouldn't have labeled it as such). "So, anything interesting happening with Bulis?"

"Not a thing," said Ryan, shaking his head not all that sadly. "Hasn't asked for a lawyer, even when we offered him one, hasn't done anything actually. He just sat down there in a holding cell, which he had all to himself, by the way, until you called in and we brought him up to the Box."

She turned to look. There was indeed an officer in uniform standing guard over the door into the interrogation room, and if she took a few steps to the side she would probably be able to see Bulis through the window. "No one's interviewed him yet?"

"And miss seeing you go to town on his ass?" Esposito piped up, catching the tail end of the conversation as he returned to the bullpen with a file folder in hand. "No way, lady."

"Esposito!" she greeted him happily. "Is that evidence—" She reached a hand out for the manila folder. "—or a birthday card for Lanie?"

"Wait, I thought her birthday wasn't until—" he spluttered until he realized she was joking. "Actually, it's the latest enhancement of the traffic cam footage that shows our victim near the abandoned building she was found in and someone walking with her. They've been trying to get the resolution up to where we can actually identify him, but right now the best we can say is that he's male and probably in his twenties or thirties. The clothes sort of match what Bulis seems to wearing on another traffic cam we found where he's walking with his buddy from the coffee place, but that wasn't a very good camera and on both videos they're so generic they could be anyone. Anyway, this guy is carrying a backpack and Bulis in the other video isn't."

Esposito pulled the still frame out of the folder and handed it to Beckett, who looked it over. Steph was clearly visible, with a coffee mug in one hand and something that Beckett rather thought was a wooden stake in the other. The light had caught her face just right as she looked up, and the timestamp from the camera that had snapped a picture of a red-light runner placed this moment right on the edge of their kill zone, but her companion had been looking down and moving as the shutter had blinked. His features were fuzzy and shadowed, and his clothes were the anonymous blur of almost all male chilly weather gear. The enlargement didn't help. Based on what they knew about Steph's vital statistics, her height in particular, the man in the picture might be Martin Bulis, but he lacked any defining features. They couldn't even see if he was wearing Martin's little beard-and-mustache combination, as no light had been cast on his face. But he was indeed carrying a backpack.

Sharing the expression on her face and Ryan's, who was looking over her shoulder, Esposito added, "They have a few more tricks they can try down in the photo lab, so maybe they'll come up with something else."

"Well, it can't hurt to mention it if it looks like pushing him could help," Beckett decided, starting to hand it back to Esposito.

"What can't hurt to mention? Is that a picture? Can I see?" Castle greeted them all, approaching with Beckett's coffee on offer.

"Traffic cam enhancement," she brought him up to speed, trading him the snapshot for the mug of almost-but-not-quite-too-hot very good coffee. It was magic Castle coffee, she'd long since decided, since it was never quite as good even if she went to the same place and bought the same thing and experimented with how long it should be given to cool. She'd told Lanie this once, although not that she had timed the cooling process, taking sips at regular intervals to find out when it would taste just as good as when Castle brought it to the 12th. Lanie had given her the 'girl, you are _pathetic_ and why don't you just jump that man' look. Kate Beckett had very hurriedly changed the subject.

Castle looked it over, turning it this way and that as if he could illuminate a bygone Tuesday night with the fluorescent lights overhead. "It sort of looks like him. But not definitely. Hey!" he interrupted his own train of thought, distracted. "Who wrote 'big honking evidence list' on the board? Because that wasn't me," he defended himself, turning to Beckett to plead his case.

As she gathered up photocopies of the evidence she meant to use or refer to in the upcoming interrogation, Beckett pointed at Esposito, who failed to look innocent in any way whatsoever.

"Castle," she called, although she hated to interrupt the spectacle of him craning back and forth at ridiculous angles to read the aforementioned evidence list, "you coming?" She took a few steps towards the interrogation room to illustrate.

"Wouldn't miss it," he averred, abandoning the murderboard and handing over the snapshot, which she added to her evidence folder.

Ryan and Esposito followed them, Ryan a little more vocally than his partner. "Wait a minute!" he protested. "You still haven't told us how you ended up in the deep dark subway tunnels or what you were doing there!"

Beckett and Castle looked each other and exchanged miniscule shrugs. Neither of them had come up with a good cover story yet, and the truth was not going to play well with the guys—much less Montgomery.

"Later," Beckett told them. "Once this case is over." By which time they'd hopefully have come up with something believable.

"Sorry, guys," she heard Castle say over his shoulder to Ryan and Esposito, "looks like the latest installment of Adventure Time with Beckett and Castle will have to wait."

They seemed to settle for that, because as she and Castle headed to the interrogation room and the guys broke off to the adjacent room on the other side of the two-way mirror she also heard Ryan exclaim, "Hey dude. Dude. Bulis. Box. _Beckett._"

Esposito added, "Bingo!" and she could almost see them fist-bump.

* * *

"Detective Beckett?" said Martin Bulis. "Mr. Castle? I thought—" He glanced around the room from the corner he'd taken up residence in as if looking for someone else. Ryan and Esposito, she assumed.

"Hello again, Martin," she answered casually. "We need to talk. Sit down, please." Following her own directions, she took a seat in one of the chairs with its back to the two-way mirror. Castle took the other, leaving Martin with no choice but to sit down exposed to whoever might be watching from behind the glass.

He hovered for a minute more, and then threw himself into the remaining chair almost convulsively before jumping up, leaning across the table, and saying fervently, "I didn't kill her! She was my _friend_!"

"So I've been told. Sit down. Actually," she went on, placing her hand on the full file folder almost absently, "I've been told quite a lot of things since we last spoke. One thing I don't know, though, is why you were hiding out at that shop. You seem to spend a lot of time there, if the parking tickets you've gotten in the last few months are any indication. Why?" Her tone was friendly, non-confrontational, meant to lure Bulis into a false sense of security as they talked about things that couldn't get him in trouble. It would all go out the window the minute she saw an opportunity to trap him in a lie or an incriminating statement.

Martin fidgeted before deciding that it was a harmless enough question. "It's sort of my workroom. I use it for…experiments…that I can't do at home. No one's ever there."

Beckett said nothing, and Castle followed her lead, knowing that she used silence as a tool. Most people felt compelled to fill in blank spaces, especially if they were answering questions and the silence implied that the answer hadn't been sufficient.

Sure enough, Martin went on. "I was trying some things that I read in a book at home—at my brother's house—and I almost destroyed some stuff by mistake. I knew what I did wrong and I could do it better next time, I said, but he told me I wasn't allowed to try it again at home. So I found somewhere else to practice."

"Sounds interesting," Castle commented. "Did you ever figure it out?"

"Yeah, yeah I did," he nodded, breaking into a tiny smile at the thought of achieving something interesting. "You wouldn't believe it if I told you."

Beckett didn't let him get too confident. "We've been in your brother's house, Martin. We just might."

The smile fell away really quickly, eroding his self-confidence even further as it scrabbled for a grip on the edges and missed.

"So tell me again how you knew Stephanie Amador," the detective instructed him.

"She. Was. My. Friend." Martin gritted out, as if saying it again and slowly this time would make her believe it. "We met just after I started working at Krimsonn. I noticed her because she kept coming in regularly—and usually right before we closed. Most people don't want coffee at eleven PM but when I asked she said she worked really late. We'd chat while I was closing up the shop sometimes. She kicked that drunk guy out—you saw the video. She told great stories."

"What kind of stories?" Castle wanted to know and, to disguise his real reason for asking, added, "I'm a writer, so I'm always interested in stories."

Martin stared at him, calculating, and mistakenly decided it was safe. "Monsters in New York, magic and fantasy, that sort of thing. I think she watched a lot of movies," he tried to laugh it off.

"Did you believe her?" Beckett asked quietly.

"What? Uh, no. It was silly stuff. But I liked them. I liked talking to her."

"Ever ask her out?" Sometimes lawyers said that they never asked questions without already knowing the answer. It was a useful strategy for detectives, too.

"No. I kinda wanted to. She was really cute, but she was way out of my league, y'know?"

"Why was that, Martin?"

Martin couldn't answer that truthfully without explaining that he knew Steph had been a Slayer and thereby revealing more knowledge than he was pretending to have. He finally settled for, "I just knew."

"Really? Did you know she was going to ask you?"

"What?" said Martin again, but in a different tone. "How do you know that?"

"She even gave you a nickname so she could talk about you to her friends without ruining the surprise," Castle said. "She called you 'Taylor'. Talked about you all the time, apparently."

He hadn't known this, and was going, to Beckett's expert eye, a little pale. "Really?"

"A shame you had that fight a couple weeks ago," Beckett continued casually. "We hear it got kind of violent. She broke some of your things, didn't she?"

"Who told you that?"

"She was upset, you know. She called someone she trusted and told her that a friend had betrayed her. Steph wanted that friend back."

Helpfully, Castle said, "That'd be you."

Beckett opened her file folder, and withdrew two photographs. "We found this in her apartment," she said, sliding the picture of the half-statue concealed in Steph's apartment across the table, "and this in your room." The picture of the rest of the statue, in several pieces, joined the first image.

Martin picked them up and looked them over, which Beckett realized as an action that gave him time to think. She'd recently been told that she fiddled with her hair for much the same reason, although she wasn't sure how much she trusted that assessment…or, more accurately, the assessor.

"It was an accident," Martin said finally, putting them down and pushing the pictures back towards Beckett. "Steph took the other half with her because she was still mad and thought I'd have to come find her and apologize to get it back. But it wasn't that important. I'm surprised she kept it."

"Really?" Beckett silently blessed Ryan and Esposito and the wonderful things they could get done while she wasn't there. While she'd been wandering around tunnels, they'd been doing detective work. "This seems like a lot of money for something unimportant." They'd found a receipt from one of the pawn shops Steph had been checking out before she died. She had been following up leads to find out who had purchased the statue, and the guys had found Martin's purchase of the statue in the records they'd obtained while following in her footsteps.

Martin looked at the purchase record she handed him, and rallied well. "You're telling me you've never bought something on impulse and regretted it? It looked neat in the shop and I was having a good day. But it didn't match my stuff, okay?"

"Why didn't you take it back?" Beckett asked. "Before Steph broke it, of course."

"You don't take things back to pawnshops, Detective. They're not good about returns, unless it was broken when you bought it, and even then…look, is this all? I had a fight with a friend where no one got hurt, almost two weeks later she's killed horribly, and you think I killed her because—what? I never got to ask her out and some dumb statue got broken?"

Well, if he was going to shout, she was going to push back. "Do you know what this is, Martin?" This picture was of the empty bottle of tizanadine that Leesha had found in Matthew and Martin Bulis' house.

"It's an empty pill bottle." He looked again. "And it's my brother's. Look, there's his name on the label."

"Along with the prescription date," Beckett pointed out. "Very recently, as it happens. Martin, we did some research. If your brother needed this much medication in that short a time, he would not be overseas traveling on business."

"Good for him. So?"

"So Steph was poisoned, Martin."

When he didn't reply, Castle took a turn. "She and her friends know about this stuff. Knew it right away. They call it 'moxie'. Know why? Because if one of them is dosed with it, moxie—that means _courage_—is all they have left."

"What happened to the rest of the medicine in this bottle?" Beckett demanded.

"I don't know." Martin's denial was sullen.

"As it happens, tizanadine capsules—like the ones that used to be in here—" she emphasized, moving the image back into his field of view, "—can also be broken open and the medicine put in food or drink. Like the coffee you mixed for her the night she died, for example."

He said nothing.

"We found the wrappers for surgical tubing in your trashcan. They had food stains on them, but I'm sure your fingerprints will turn up all over that plastic. Her killer, Martin, used that kind of tubing to drain her blood." Martin stared into space resolutely, and she stood and leaned over the table to get into his field of view. "Martin! She was scared. She was drugged so she couldn't fight and tied up, and her heart was _racing_."

She wanted to meet his eyes as she spoke, but he wouldn't look at her. "Her own heart killed her, Martin. She gave it to the wrong person—and he used it to kill her."

When Martin moved, almost thirty seconds later, it was to shake his head fervently. "No. No. NO! I didn't kill her!" he reiterated. "I had no reason to kill her—no _motive_, isn't that how you say it? She was my friend, we'd had a fight, but we made up, right? Otherwise why would she come back and hang out with me again? If she didn't trust me why would she accept a drink from me?"

Castle was pretty sure he knew where Beckett would take that, so he set it up nicely for her. "What is it you do at that…shall we call it a workshop?" he punned harmlessly. "Must be something really interesting if your brother chucked it out of the house."

The young man looked severely wrong-footed. "I made something explode," he said before he could think. "Little things," he amended, realizing that telling the police that you like to make things explode was something that would probably not win their friendship. "Not big things. And, and it was just a trick, anyway."

"Oh, right," sighed Beckett, sitting back down as if relaxing. "Magic tricks."

"Um, yeah." He thought about it. "I guess."

"Now, Martin, before you go any further," she warned him, "we've seen some of your magic tricks. There were some clever ones in your house—you didn't really move everything to your workshop—" That was cute, Castle, thanks, she thought. "—did you? There were the amusing booby trap tricks. And that particularly clever one."

His eyes raced back and forth, obviously trying to think of which particular little surprise she was referring to.

"The one with the mirror," Castle informed him, and enjoyed the look of surprise that he tried to cover. He clearly had not intended anyone who stumbled into that to come back to complain to him about it. More importantly, he now knew that they knew what they were talking about, and that his talk of magic tricks and minor explosions was a cover story. God knew what he'd actually been practicing in that empty space.

Beckett went with it. "Luckily we have some good friends. Some friends in common, actually. _I_ was Steph's friend. And they knew her pretty well. They tell me—Steph's friends—that she loved to tell stories. But you knew that. And one day she told you about how she got to be the way she was, why she could do the things she could do."

As it was, Beckett thought ruefully, _she_ barely believed in half the things she'd seen and been told about over the past few days. She did not want to go on a police recording talking about Slayers and special powers and magical booby traps. Fortunately, Martin seemed to know how he'd sound talking about them too, and was mostly speaking in euphemisms.

"She told a lot of stories," he said cautiously.

"She was quite a woman, wasn't she?" Castle prodded him. "She was cute, she had a great imagination, she was a fighter…that's quite a mix. No wonder you felt outclassed. And you still wanted to ask her out? What made you think she'd say yes?"

They had just told him that Steph had been planning to make a move of her own anyway, but as Castle and Beckett understood it, Martin had killed Steph because he _had_ felt outclassed and she'd reviled his attempt to even the score a little. If they were right, he was likely to jump on that.

He did. "I'd have thought of something. We were friends, right? There had to be something she liked about me. I'd even have helped her…uh, that is, if she wanted to play at running around New York hunting monsters," Martin improvised.

"So you were going to do better, is that right?" Beckett checked. "Impress her somehow?"

Martin was remembering to be wary now. "Never hurts, right?"

She smiled at him, and it was not a very happy smile. "Steph wasn't very impressed, though, was she? She got angry, instead. Maybe you tried a little too hard and tried something dangerous. She stopped you. She didn't know you were trying to be her equal—to help her, right? All she saw was someone she liked doing something stupid, even though she'd told you all about how stupid it was. All those stories and you hadn't learned a thing."

He was positively grey now. "I didn't kill her," he repeated stubbornly.

Beckett played the traffic cam footage card, extracting the printed photograph from her folder and placing it before him with a tap of her finger on the time-and-date stamp. "You were with her right before she died. This is two blocks away from the place she died. Here's Steph. There's the coffee you made her. She hadn't felt the effects yet, had she? And here's you."

Martin looked at the picture, and thought about it, evidently still a little shaken from Beckett's exposure of his thoughts and feelings. "That could be anyone," he said finally. "That's not me," he added more determinedly.

"You don't have an alibi," she warned him. "The movie theatre? It's not going to hold up."

"I could sneak out of the Angelica," Castle colored in the details for her. "My _daughter_ could sneak out of the Angelica. She could sneak out by _accident_."

"At that time of night, you could get your ticket, put in some face time, and sneak right back out to meet up with Steph around here." She slid the photograph towards him again. "Still want to tell me this isn't you?"

He said nothing, and she pushed harder on the motive, which usually got to people who had committed murder for emotional reasons. (Hard evidence usually worked better on those who had acted for money or on impulse, she'd found, not that it was a hard and fast rule.) "She wanted to be your friend again, Martin. She reached out to you to clear up that confused mess you two had gotten into. Maybe she was even a little touched that you'd tried to be worthy of her, to help her, once the shock of you doing something stupid wore off. Because as far as she knew, you'd stopped. You'd understood what you'd done wrong and were willing to be friends again. She was more forgiving than you were. And that was her mistake, wasn't it? Thinking that you valued her friendship more than your pride."

They didn't have a lot of evidence, Beckett knew, so she watched Martin carefully as he thought about what she'd said and his possible courses of action. What they had was, as she'd had to point out to Castle on more than one occasion before and probably would have to on any number of cases since, a story. A good story, a story that made sense, but not one backed up by solid witnesses, video footage, or forensic evidence. She needed him to confess.

He didn't.

"No," he repeated. "I didn't kill her. You can't prove I did. So I didn't. And that's my final word on the subject, so either arrest me properly and try to prove it in a courtroom—because you can't, and I'll call Matthew and he'll get me a real lawyer, not some crap public defender like your buddies tried to offer me—or let me go."

Beckett was not going to get angry. She definitely was not going to get angry, and she reminded herself forcefully of that as the emotional part of her brain that did not like to listen to this tried to get very angry at this man indeed.

"Martin Bulis," she said formally, for the recorder, "you are still under arrest for the murder of Stephanie Amador. For the moment, you will be taken back to a holding cell while this investigation continues." She proceeded to read out the date and the time and identify all participants in the room before switching off the recorder.

"I didn't," Martin said stubbornly, but as she rose from her seat she caught his eyes unexpectedly and she saw that it was obstinacy rather than truth. Beckett wasn't going to say anything off the record—it was already irregular that she was a friend of the victim in this case, and only because Steph's friends would only talk honestly to her had she been left on the case—so she simply stared back and let him know that she knew. He looked away.

Castle followed her out the door, but had no such reservations about impromptu statements. "As they say, Martin, the proof is out there."

Egregious misquotations aside.

* * *

"If this were an Agatha Christie novel," speculated Castle as they rejoined Ryan and Esposito, "people confronted with the suggestion of evidence would jump up and confess all the time. Her detectives _never_ have hard evidence. It's all 'you did this and this is why' and 'he did that because I say so' and people jump up and confess."

"That would be nice," Beckett said halfheartedly. But in the real world, she needed forensic evidence, a confession, or both, and Martin Bulis had taken the road of digging in his heels and repeating that he didn't do it until the detective ran out of ways to prove that he did. She hated it when they did that.

"So what now?" Ryan wanted to know as they slogged dispiritedly back to the little hub of desks and chairs and oversized whiteboard that made up home base for Beckett's miniature taskforce.

"Now we find evidence," she replied, even though that seemed fairly obvious. "I'll ask Lanie if there's anything else she can learn from Steph's body. Some tests that took time to run or something she's thought of recently. While I'm doing that, Esposito, go and check with the photo lab or the computer technicians or whoever's looking into that surveillance footage. Ryan, get onto Krimsonn and see if anyone remembers what Bulis was wearing last Tuesday night, especially if he had a backpack. Maybe we can match that up with what that guy's wearing on the traffic camera."

"What about me?" Castle wanted to know as they reached the bullpen and the guys went about their tasks. "What can I do to help?"

She reached around for something he could do and came up with two things. "Did you ever finish going through Steph's computer?"

"No," he admitted. "I stopped once I found that the mysterious Taylor was coffee-boy over there." He nodded over his shoulder at Martin Bulis, who was being led from the interrogation room by a uniformed policewoman.

"Well, get back on that, see if you find anything else interesting. And if you get the chance while you're working on that…"

"What?"

She smiled beseechingly at him. "Pizza delivery?"

* * *

Martin Bulis sat in his holding cell and tried to think of ways that he could get out of this without bringing his older brother into the picture. He was sick and tired of having to run to Matthew—the _older_ brother, the _successful_ brother—for help and support and occasionally for spending money, and the advice that came, unwanted, with it all. But he'd dropped out of college because they didn't offer classes in his real interest—the magic, the legends—and he couldn't be bothered to go to boring classes in much else, and as a result there weren't that many places that would hire him. Krimsonn, he'd decided not long after getting a job there, was almost as boring as accountancy classes, although at least Krimsonn hadn't been Matthew's idea like the accounting minor had been.

How the hell, he wondered, had he been so unlucky as to leave Steph's body in a place where it had been almost immediately found? She'd been talking just the other day about how the building was going to be torn down and at least half a dozen kinds of demons that she was worried about _this_ month would have to find somewhere else to prowl. They shouldn't have found her until after it had been knocked down, and wouldn't that have messed any evidence up but good, if he'd left some? The police wouldn't be able to find any, and the Slayers would have heard 'throat lacerations, blood everywhere' and started sharpening stakes. They wouldn't have looked any further. They'd have just gone on with their endless war. The Slayers forgot about the police, he had learned, and he had picked up the habit. That had been a mistake.

But no, someone had to find her body. But no, the detective assigned to the case knew what Slayers were—knew who Steph was, worse still! But no, she'd asked all the right questions and hung on to the case even though the other two Slayers, whom Martin had never met, had probably taken off on their war against everything nonhuman anyway.

Martin took a deep breath, tipped his head back against the cold stone wall, and let it out slowly. They didn't have any proof, he reminded himself. There was no way they would get the traffic cameras or whatever surveillance footage to resolve enough to show his face. Even an amateur magic user could muck up a camera's workings—in fact, _not_ disrupting electronics was the harder task to learn. He'd long since learned to manipulate the energy around himself in a sort of poor mage's invisibility cloak. Didn't do anything about people, but hell on cameras.

They didn't have the cameras. And they didn't have the clothes, which had been unbelievably messy. She had struggled, although he'd put most of his brother's medicine in that coffee and without Slayer strength, she'd been just a petite girl who'd been taken by surprise and knocked down against a hard floor. Her blood had gotten all over his sweater and pants as he'd held her down and it had gushed out into the two gallon jars he'd packed in the backpack. He'd picked it up at the Angelica where he'd left it, full of generic plastic jugs and surgical tubes and some hollow needles he'd stolen from a charity clinic he'd stopped by one day. They'd been having a rush day and no one had looked twice at him after he volunteered to help fetch and carry and rolled up his sleeves to prove that he wasn't a drug addict looking for clean needles to enable his next fix. Needle track-free, his help had been welcomed.

Rope was cheap. Rope was easy. Rope was everywhere. Rope could be cut into little tiny pieces with kitchen scissors and scattered into every trashcan he passed.

He'd gotten rid of the clothes. He'd packed a change of clothes and easily flattened sandals and some wipes to get rid of the worst of what had ended up on his skin. Once he was clean and changed so that he would leave no tracks when he moved away, he'd poured the blood that had pooled in the jars over her body, careful not to splash and directing it over anywhere he'd touched or stepped. It had been horribly metallic and he had felt as if it had caught in his teeth, as if he was chewing on her death every time he moved his mouth.

The bloody clothes he had dumped in an alleyway far from the building where Steph's body lay, certain that some homeless passerby in need of a warm sweater would pick it up and take it even further away, never to be seen again. He hadn't gone back to check—that would be stupid, with the police wandering around—but it had been almost a week. The clothes were long gone.

So, he reminded himself, they didn't have the cameras and they didn't have the clothes and they apparently didn't have any forensic evidence, or that unnecessarily persistent Detective Beckett would have dropped it in front of him just like she'd presented those pictures.

He just wished that she hadn't been on good terms with the Slayers. She had gotten a lot of it, he admitted to himself nervously. He didn't know how, didn't know who she'd talked to—hell, he didn't know who _Steph_ had talked to. He'd assumed that because she'd kept her friendship with him secret, never making him part of her little gang, she'd have kept the fight they'd had secret too.

Damn it, he had wanted to help! She'd been better than the 'cute' he'd told Beckett and her inexplicable shadow Castle, she'd been _gorgeous_. He'd have called her 'vivacious' if that hadn't been horribly fifties and somehow implied redheads with curly hair and swimsuits. The _life_ in her had lit her up; she'd so obviously loved what she was doing. Saving the world. One monster at a time. We're not losing, she'd insisted, laughing. We're here. So we're winning.

Huh. Well, now she wasn't.

She'd been _shocked_ to see him; it hadn't been him she'd been looking for, it was the statue. The pure demon _in_ _potentia_, the trader had called it, trying to impress him. Its power had impressed him. Its potential to help him had impressed him. _It_ had been powerful enough to get her attention, but it hadn't worked like he'd hoped. Steph had been furious. You idiot, she'd yelled at him. What do you think you're doing? How dare you do this?

And she'd smashed it. It had taken over a year to find and he'd paid more for it than Beckett thought. That was just what had gone down on the ledger. He'd paid more in promises that hadn't been written down. Items he'd traded that had vanished as if they'd never existed. And she had broken it beyond repair as if it were some dollar-fifty ceramic plate from a general store.

_How dare you._ Even now, even though he'd made her pay for those words, they still made him angry. As if she had been so much better. As if he couldn't hope to be anything near her.

She had been furious. The detective and her friend were wrong. Martin had seen in her eyes that he'd done something unforgivable, and in trying to obtain what he'd most wanted he'd traded that very thing away. He'd wanted to be her lover, and he'd become her enemy instead.

Deals with the devil. He should have known.

"I'm told it's a hell of a thing, killing a Slayer. Did it make you feel all special inside?"

He opened his eyes and sat up, startled. It didn't take long to find the source of the voice. She was leaning against the wall outside his cell, beyond the bars, and she was _definitely_ not a cop.

"Who are you?" he blurted out. "How did you get in here?" A suspicion came over him, and he narrowed his eyes, looking her over and wishing he'd asked Steph more about her fellow Slayers while she was still speaking to him. She was small, blonde, fair, slender, confident, twenties…very cute. Not a cop. The clothes she was wearing said that; the attitude said more. She was…balanced. Wary, but not afraid. More _aware_ than wary, actually. Also, she knew who he was—and she did not like him. But she wasn't looking for a way to get through the bars between him and her and hurt him. Another Slayer, then.

"So are you Leesha or Perrin?"

"Nope. Y'know, there are actually more than two of us these days. But you knew that, didn't you?"

"Did Beckett send you down here?" he demanded. He wished he hadn't. It had sounded more desperate than demanding.

She grinned. It was a faintly disturbing smile. "Kate Beckett is a wonderful woman. I quite like her. But she has no idea I'm down here. Fact is, she told me 'stay out, 'less I know you're here'. One of these days I will work on listening to people who tell me not to do things. When I have the time."

Martin now knew no more than he had a minute ago. "What do you want?"

"I always try to find out about things that kill one Slayer, just in case they think they can run off and kill more. I like telling 'em they're wrong. You, by the way," she added tauntingly, "do _not_ measure up."

He was being insulted. He knew he was being insulted. But just in case this woman was Beckett's attempt at getting him to confess—the detective had admitted that she knew other Slayers, and there was no way she and her friend had gotten out of the lost subways by themselves—he held his tongue and didn't tell her exactly how easy Steph had been to kill. "I didn't kill her," he said again, with a sigh as if tired of repeating it. He _was_ tired of repeating it.

The woman smiled at him prettily and said, "You're lying," confidently. He had a plan all prepared to close his eyes and ignore her until she went away, but she went on to say, "Did you know that feelings have smells? Not smooth-feeling, rough-feeling, although I suppose if you're feeling rough, y'know, that would have a smell."

He had to open his eyes to properly give her a 'what the hell are you talking about?' look, which kind of ruined his whole plan to ignore her. His plans always worked out better if he had time to think about them in advance.

"Fear has a smell—even humans can smell that, it gets bad enough," she explained. "Guilt has a smell. Apparently, lying-to-me has a smell. That must be the reason, 'cause otherwise I'd get away with it a whole lot more. I have a friend, you see—" She stopped, thought about it, went on as Martin stared at her in utter confusion. "—I have _two_ friends, since Oz turned up again, who always know when someone is sick or angry or upset, because there's a smell of it, you see."

"Whatever," Martin muttered, hoping this crazy woman would go away. Based on previous evidence, though, it was not, he mused regretfully, his lucky day.

"—makes lying to him pretty well impossible. It's very annoying. Wish I could do that, 'cause _you_, Martin, would smell guilty as hell. If hell smells guilty. It would, though, don't you think?"

What?

"_They_ probably wouldn't believe me anyway," she went on, flicking a thumb up towards the ceiling and the general direction of, presumably, Beckett and her detective crew.

"But here's the thing, and it's a big thing, so listen up."

He had nothing better to do until whatever police officer was supposed to be guarding the holding cells and keeping random Slayers from harassing him turned up and actually did his job. He definitely wasn't going to shout at her and cause a scene that would cause him to be recorded as anything else but a model prisoner. So Martin listened up, even though he didn't bother to look at her.

"_You_ killed a friend of mine," she said seriously.

"No," he denied tiredly.

"You did. And you know you did, so you smell guilty. Just 'cause I can't smell it doesn't mean it's not there." She sighed regretfully. "Hell, maybe we both do."

That made so little sense, even compared to everything else she'd been saying, that he had to look over at her.

"I sent her here," the Slayer said. She looked, suddenly, very tired. "I told her she could change the world. That's so much more important than saving it, did you know? You save the world, no one notices. It keeps on going and everyone can pretend you didn't do anything, even though you did. But you _change_ the world…that matters, see? That's why Steph was here. That's why she did what she did. And you—you have no idea why she did anything. You thought you knew everything and you just don't get any of it."

She sagged against the wall and closed her eyes. For a moment, Martin thought that she had actually gone to sleep, exhausted by the work she did and the life she lived. But just as he was almost starting to believe this, she dragged herself to her feet and crossed the couple of paces to the bars, staring him down.

"Are you listening to me, Martin? Because here's the thing. You get out of here? _We_ are coming for you. All of the Slayers. Anywhere you go. You killed one of our own, and we are _not_ happy bundles of joy because of it."

To his dismay, Martin realized that he had pressed himself as far into the furthest corner from her as he could go. "You don't hurt humans," he croaked. Steph had said that once. "You don't, it's not allowed."

"We don't _kill_ humans," she corrected him angrily. "Gotta be better than the bad guys in some ways. But there are _loads_ of ways to make someone's life miserable without killing him. Plenty of people I know could stand to go ouch for a while."

The Slayer meant it. He could tell. It was in the obviousness of everything she said. Her words, her body language, the way one hand was working on putting fingerprints in the steel of the bar while the other was clenched round what looked like a knife worn against her back. That was a dead giveaway.

And she wouldn't stop until she was sure that he'd gotten her point…so to speak. "We can be anywhere. We could be anyone. Somewhere with big locks and people to keep an eye on you…sounding better all the time, huh? And hey, you'll be the Big Bad. Sure there are plenty of people ready to be impressed you killed a woman who trusted you. Just none of them are out here."

Martin had seen Steph fight, with all the grace and speed and power of an avalanche. He'd seen her angry. He'd seen her not angry or particularly put out at all, pulling off feats of strength and agility that would have made an Olympic athlete cry.

He was beginning to realize that his only advantage—the element of surprise—was utterly lost, and that he'd angered some very dangerous people.

When he looked up, she was gone, with no more evidence of how she'd gotten out than how she'd gotten in. They are hunters, he thought, and there is a more dangerous game than man.

"Officer!" he shouted suddenly, before she could come back or another one could get in to do more than talk. "_Officer!_ I want to talk to Detective Beckett!"

* * *

**Author's Note:** Oh my god, as I finish this scene—with another scene bumped to the next chapter!—it's five-thirty in the morning. Where did all this… Typical. One of these days I'll learn to write in reliable intervals rather than dumping twelve pages of Verdana 9-point text to Word in a few hours.

**SO:** Opinions? I am not a violent person—I don't even own a water gun, although I do carry pepper spray—so it's very hard for me to come up with compelling reasons to kill someone. (Sarcasm is so much more satisfying!) In no particular order, then: Do Martin's motives 'work'? Have I gotten Buffy's dialogue a little closer to her distinctive voice? How did Martha and Alexis' cameos fit in? How about the interrogation?

**Next and Lastly:** The validity of threats. It's still always about blood. And drinks at the Old Haunt are on Castle. See you there.


	12. Chapter 12: Epilogue: Once Upon A Crime

**Chapter Twelve/Epilogue: Once Upon A Crime**

**Author's Note: **This is the last chapter of "Paint the Town Red". Since the bottom of this page is taken up with a "making-of" section, I'd like to take this chance to thank several groups of people. ONE: Everyone who has reviewed this story, including the people who made helpful suggestions or had useful insights and those who I couldn't contact directly because they did so anonymously or with the PM function switched off. TWO: The people who have PtTR on alert list, who waited patiently for updates while I did strange things like become a legal adult, write an academic research paper on Discordianism, or see _The Avengers_ five times. THREE: Those readers who added PtTR to their favorites list, helping it achieve my personal standard of success (as many or more favorites than chapters). FOUR: My brother, who brainstormed the plot with me, beta-read the whole darn thing a chapter at a time, and laughed at all the right places. FIVE: Andrew W. Marlowe and Joss Whedon, the real owners and creators of _Castle_ and _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_, respectively. Of course.

ON WITH THE SHOW!

"It's her blood," said Lanie.

"Are you sure?" Beckett asked, looking over the clothes lying on Lanie's autopsy table where bodies usually rested. The last time she had been down here, the table had been occupied by Steph's corpse. Then, both detective and victim had been missing some things. The sweatshirt, t-shirt, and once-khaki pants that now lay there filled in the missing pieces of blood and evidence, cooperatively provided by Martin Bulis, Steph's murderer, during yesterday's surprise confession. It had taken Beckett and her team a while to find the clothes, but once they had…

The little M.E. nodded confirmation solemnly. "As close as I can be without extensive DNA testing," she amended a moment later. "The blood type matches your victim, and it's full of tizanadine—a very high concentration." Catching her friend's train of thought before Beckett could even open her mouth to utter the words, Lanie raised a hand to cut her off and added, "I've put in a request for the DNA analysis anyway. It'll be a few days before it comes back—no amount of harassing the lab will make the machines work any faster—but I can tell you based on just what I can do here that whoever was wearing these clothes was in _very_ close contact with your victim as she was bleeding out. And I can do one better. Look at this."

Castle and Beckett obediently looked as Lanie held up a sample tube that contained three barely-visible slivers of—

"Are those fingernails?" wondered Castle.

She beamed approval at him, and he grinned back. "That they are. Pulled out of the weave of the sweatshirt, and they match up to the very ragged nails on her right index and middle finger and left thumb. She fought back as much as she could."

"They don't quit," said Beckett quietly.

"So I've heard," remarked Lanie, cutting into an impending reverie. "And the sweatshirt and tee were full of hairs and skin cells. More than enough to identify the owner."

They knew what the solution to that riddle would be, but they still let Lanie wrap it up with, "Your boy in the cells."

"We've got him." Beckett cracked a smile through the scowl that had been on her face ever since finding the blood-stiffened, stinking ball of clothes that had been abandoned in an alleyway. Martin Bulis must have been hoping that they would be taken, because he had left them on the street rather than in a trashcan, which might be searched by investigators before the garbage collection had been taken up. That had backfired on him. They had been far too ruined for even the most desperate of individuals to take and wear, and although the flies had mostly moved on to other haunts, she could easily imagine the buzzing cloud that must have discouraged any passersby from investigating further.

"The hair is enough to establish it as his even without whatever he told you," Lanie assured her. They'd filled her in on the bare details, but she was reserving the bulk of her curiosity about Martin's impromptu fit of guilt until after her friend had gotten everything resolved to her satisfaction and the two were talking it over in the comfort and privacy of somewhere that wasn't a morgue. "The large quantities of drug-infused blood and fingernail shards are hers. I'd like to see anyone come up with an innocent explanation for that."

"Maybe—" Castle started up irrepressibly. Both women glared at him, and he stopped with his mouth open for a moment before thinking better of it and closing it again.

"And by now you'd think I'd know not to say that in front of Castle," Lanie muttered, mostly to herself.

"Thanks, Lanie," Beckett said, already mentally moving on to the next step in locking away a murderer and physically heading towards the door.

Castle, predictably, followed her, but caught the door as it was closing behind him and leaned back into the room. "Solved-a-case party at the Old Haunt!" he told her. "Tonight. 8:30. I'm buying. You should come."

"Off shift at nine, writer boy," said Lanie. "Think you can keep the fun going until then?"

"I," he told her archly, which is hard to do when you're leaning backwards through a doorway, balancing on one foot, and hanging onto a swinging door for tentative support, "am a maestro of fun."

She waved a clipboard at him. "Get out of my morgue, Castle."

* * *

"Box it up!" Beckett greeted Ryan and Esposito. The boys were hovering around her desk waiting for the forensic results that would determine whether Martin's abrupt reversal and apparently unrestricted confession would actually have any real-world applications. They'd all gone with her to track down the missing blood-covered clothes that Martin had claimed he'd just left lying around, but all blood looked and smelled the same, at least to humans. It could have been someone else's blood. It could even have been animal blood.

It hadn't been. "I'm calling the DA," she told them, lifting an empty evidence box out of her chair and taking its place. "With the forensic evidence, we've got more than enough to make a case."

Esposito high-fived Ryan, who high-fived Castle, who high-fived Esposito. Beckett bit her lip, looked intently at her computer screen, and tried not to laugh at them. She appreciated their humor more than she usually let on—if she admitted she found them funny, they might stop trying. The actual detectives in the room started tracking down and packing up file folders (Esposito) and disassembling the murderboard (Ryan).

Castle dumped himself into his usual chair and devoted himself to interrogating Beckett while she was trying to be on the phone, which he considered to be a highly underrated form of entertainment. "So, what if he starts talking to a lawyer about demons and monsters and superwomen and all? Isn't that going to invalidate his confession if he doesn't seem to know what 'reality—'" He made air quotes, and finished, "—is?"

Momentarily ignoring him, Beckett gave her identification and reason for calling to the male underling who had picked up the phone in the legal office on the other end. She was promptly put on hold. While the hold menu talked in one ear, she turned her attention to Castle.

"He probably will," she agreed amicably, "once he gets over the urge to confess. He'll probably even try to retract his confession. Unfortunately for him, he told us where forensic evidence was, and we found it. We needed one or the other, and now that we have his sweatshirt full of Steph's dosed-up blood, we don't actually need his confession anymore, even though we got it on record and there's no evidence to show that it was coerced." Although she had developed some suspicions about that overnight.

Castle understood that, but it wasn't what he'd meant. "No," he persisted. "What if he tells the complete truth and the lawyer that's defending him decides he's not mentally competent?"

She told the phone that she would continue to hold, and went back to squaring things with Castle, since Ryan and Esposito were beginning to move things around him in a way that not-so-subtly suggested that he was in their way and would only be out of their way if he would get up off his butt and help them.

"Castle, even if his lawyer, a jury, and a judge decide that he's not guilty by reason of insanity, he won't go free. As long as he tells the whole story about Slayers and demons, the legal system will believe that he needs psychological care and he'll be confined in a state hospital or other mental health facility rather than a jail. If he sticks to the story he told us earlier, which is essentially the truth without any element of the world Slayers live in, the forensic evidence will convict him and he'll be sent to prison anyway. He's not getting out of this," she assured him. "I won't let him."

He seemed satisfied with this explanation, and got up to help the boys move things around for transfer to the DA's office before Ryan could 'accidentally' whack him in the head with another full box.

Since she was on hold, she didn't have to pack, which gave Beckett the chance to do some thinking instead. Martin's confession was too convenient. The man who had gone back down to the holding cells had been confident, having found a winning strategy of consistent denial of everything the police had with which to accuse him. If he had stayed silent, it probably, she privately had to admit, would have worked. Instead, a little over an hour and a half later, he had demanded to talk to her again and shown up in the interrogation room paler than before and distinctly nervous.

Something had frightened him. Enough so that he had chosen to confess and give up valuable evidence that they wouldn't have found otherwise. It was quite the reversal—a godsend to her and her team, but…

Beckett was suspicious. It was, after all, her job, and one she was very good at. At the moment, she had no way to confirm the idea that had developed as she considered possible explanations, but Martin Bulis had appeared scared of…something. There were some very dangerous people out there, she knew, none of which had any particular reason to like him. And one of those had acquired a habit of walking in and out of the 12th Precinct, unnoticed, as if she belonged there.

Hmmm…

But then again…just because Beckett wasn't allowed to intimidate suspects didn't mean that someone connected with the case couldn't walk in off the street and do so. Especially because Beckett hadn't condoned it or even known about it. She didn't like her interrogation process being taken over, but there was no way she was going to object just to be petty.

About then her call got taken off hold and she found herself verbally filling out paperwork to transfer a murder case to the legal division of the city's justice system. As she spoke, checking her notes and waiting for responses and confirmation, she could hear Montgomery congratulating her team and Castle inviting him to tonight's post-case party. She caught her Captain's eye and smiled as he nodded significantly at her. They'd done well, he managed to communicate with only a few seconds of eye contact and a single gesture. She and her team—with more than a little unofficial help—had caught a killer before he could kill anyone else, and they'd done it without putting anything supernatural on the official record.

That was worth a party for the good guys.

* * *

Monday night wasn't a terribly busy rush hour for the Old Haunt, so no one objected when the man who had recently bought the place decided that he wanted to run the bar and mix drinks for all his friends. The basement office had been securely locked and the piano lid closed for its own safety.

Word had gotten out. Ryan had invited his fiancée Jenny, who had decided that she _loved_ the Old Haunt and promised to invite all her friends some other night. Montgomery had accepted Castle's earlier effusive invitation and shown up just as Castle had invited a ridiculously fizzy, brightly colored, utterly nonalcoholic drink for Alexis, who had until 10:00 before she was sent home for school the next morning. The drink had subsequently fountained out of the glass and across the bar to pool on a bar stool, so some of the proportions had, out of necessity, been rethought. By Alexis, as it turned out, who had seen where her dad had gone wrong the first time.

Martha was drinking something elegant that looked like it had come out of a silent movie and was sharing anecdotes about all of the people in pictures on the wall that she could remember, to anyone who would listen and occasionally to the bar staff. She'd congratulated Beckett on their solved case, sympathized over the detective's loss of someone she'd known and liked, and tried to find out how her wayward writer son and his detective partner had ended up, apparently, in the abandoned subway tunnels.

Beckett had dodged the question. The two of them still hadn't come up with a believable answer, and had petitioned Montgomery to not officially inquire into those missing seven hours. He had agreed partly in self-defense; they had let him know that he wouldn't like the answers they came up with. The free drinks that Castle was buying for all his friends weren't part of that deal. They just came with the territory of being friends with Rick Castle.

Even the eyes of bar patrons who were innocent bystanders were on Castle at the bar as he was persuaded to repeat the unabridged version of his newly-dubbed Rainbow Volcano for an audience of appreciative people with towels—and one sarcastic umbrella—at the ready, so Leesha and an assortment of her friends managed to enter the bar relatively unnoticed. That didn't last very long as Castle spotted at least three familiar faces—Leesha, her very own teenage witch Holly, and the woman Jessie—among the crowd and waved them over enthusiastically.

No one bothered with large-scale introductions. 'Friend of a friend' was clearly sufficient, and the Old Haunt filled up with a wide variety of people who came and went as they pleased and were all willing to admit that they had something in common, at least. Beckett immediately lost track of who answered to whom, and who had invited who else. Perrin showed up with her own contingent of friends and allies, all of whom were subjected to Castle-invented drinks—and that was before Ryan and Esposito got in on the mixing game.

That opened the floodgates to let everyone try their own mixture. At least three combinations fizzed wildly and messily. More were rejected as clearly diabolical in taste. All books of matches, which most bars still provided for the advertising value, were hurriedly removed from the area before anything could actually explode, and a Great Match Hunt ensued for a few minutes. It was shaping up to be a large, silly party, full of people talking at cheerfully cross purposes and Castle's laugh cutting through the noise often.

Lanie showed up in company with Steph's good friend Danielle and two blond young men who had also apparently been friends of Steph and looked alike enough to be brothers, if not fraternal twins. They'd been walking the same way on their road to the Old Haunt and had ended up strolling as a group. Shooing the possibly-twins in the direction of the seething bar, Lanie headed over to Beckett's table, which the detective had claimed early, along with a drink mixed by people who actually knew what they were doing and weren't named Castle, even though Castle could mix a better-than-decent drink when he wasn't trying to show off. She had been holding the table against the tide ever since, but one of the chairs had still gone missing while she hadn't been looking.

"Since when do you throw a party when you close a case?" Lanie wanted to know, accepting the chair that Beckett pushed out for her. "Not that this doesn't look like fun, but if you guys did this every time you nabbed one of the bad guys, you'd never leave."

"We'd catch a lot less bad guys that way," Beckett pointed out.

"You _know_ what I mean."

"This isn't a party," she explained. Lanie raised her eyebrows and looked around.

"Sure looks like one. Lots of people, giant blue drinks…all it needs is a bunch of balloons and some—nope, there it goes." Someone had found a stereo. In the fifteen loud and busy seconds between the end of Lanie's sentence and the beginning of Beckett's reply, the radio station was changed twice and a call for a music player that could be connected to an iPod was taken up. All of the music clashed equally terribly with the antique atmosphere of the Old Haunt.

"It's a wake," explained Beckett. "This isn't for us, it's for Steph. For the friend they lost—someone they loved."

"Ah," said Lanie. No further explanation was needed.

Castle, having escaped the bar, made his way through the crowd and approached their table. "May I join you ladies?" he asked. With the hand that wasn't holding one of his own drinks, he produced an overly elegant flourish that just avoided hitting Perrin's friend Santiago, who ducked adroitly as he passed, grinned back over his shoulder, and headed off to wherever he had been heading in the first place.

"It's your bar," Lanie cracked at him.

"It's your table," he countered.

"Sit, Castle," Beckett pitched in before they could tangle themselves up in details—or Castle actually managed to hit anyone.

"Arf, arf," Castle barked at her teasingly, and sat.

"Sure you want to leave your bar in the hands of the—" _Party poodles_ flashed across her brain inexplicably and inappropriately. "—post-case partygoers?" Beckett compromised.

"Lloyd and Trevor can handle it," he replied confidently, referring to the two actual bartenders—whom he had called earlier to give plenty of advance warning that the owner and an unspecified number of friends would be descending on the bar to throw a party. They had promised to rise to the challenge. "And they'll be paid overtime."

Lanie got to her feet, patted her friend Beckett's hand, and smacked Castle on the shoulder rather harder. "In that case, I'm going to go see what they can make that doesn't explode," she told them both. "I like my drinks to stay where I put them."

As she left, Castle smiled at Beckett, and she couldn't help smiling back. Maybe it would be a mess later, but they'd all been under a lot of stress. She'd lost a friend, just as the people all around them had—the casual bystanders having sensed that a private party was in progress and mostly left. It helped to be surrounded by people who understood, and who had decided the proper response was to celebrate someone they'd cared about rather than grieve or get angry for longer than it took to deal with the person responsible.

She was going to say something to him along those lines, possibly deploying the bumper-sticker philosophy phrase _get angry, get even, get over it_, but was interrupted before she could even begin. Someone had evidently wrested control of the stereo or whatever music player had taken its place and begun playing vaguely danceable music, which jumped, in quick succession, between an insanely popular pop song, something nameless and techno, and what Beckett was embarrassed to know was the theme song from a Disney channel cartoon kids' series. A space was being haphazardly cleared, but a number of people weren't willing to put that much effort into it and were simply dancing among the tables. They looked outrageously out of place, and seemed to find that ironically hilarious.

Amidst all this, Leesha and Perrin appeared at Beckett and Castle's table. They looked quite serious, as if they had something important to say, and for a moment the two pairs looked at each other, unsure where to begin.

In the end, Perrin spoke, plainly.

"You do good work," she said. "We won't forget."

It was the simplest possible praise, but it took Beckett's breath away. She had no proper response. Beside her, Castle was equally speechless, a tiny bubble of silence in the hubbub surrounding them.

After a moment, Beckett settled for, "Thank you." It was apparently sufficient, because the two Slayers nodded to the detectives respectfully and left without another word.

Taken aback by the blunt but clearly extremely high praise, both Beckett and Castle resorted to drinking their drinks as they absorbed the enormous amount of respect they had clearly earned from people who most of the world thought were legends.

"Wow."

To his embarrassment, Castle jumped. He knew the voice, knew she was going to turn up…but he still jumped. He was pretty sure that after the time he had spent down in the tunnels, watching her fight, he was never going to be able to look at Buffy Summers the same way again. He was impressed, he was truly impressed, but at the same time he was also a little unbalanced. Despite everything Beckett had told him, what he'd learned about Steph over the course of the investigation, and getting to know Leesha and Perrin, he still hadn't quite believed everything he had been told about Slayers. Down in those tunnels, he had learned that not only was it all true, but that they had been understating matters. It was going to take time for him to adjust.

Either Beckett wasn't having the same thoughts, or she was better at hiding it. "I wondered when you'd get here," the detective commented lightly, gesturing the younger woman towards a seat. "Didn't think you'd miss it."

She took the offered chair, grinning. "You got shoutiness to do," she greeted Beckett. "Let's hear it, then."

The detective couldn't resist the urge to roll her eyes, but she was smiling, too. "You mean, about bullying my suspect?" And, when the accusation was not denied, "You threatened him, didn't you? You walked right back into the Precinct after I specifically told you _not_ to do that, and you threatened him."

Buffy was unrepentant at best. "Mighta suggested we were going to come after him," she admitted. "Maybe said something about Slayers following him all over to kick his ass until he went and hid under a table and never came out."

Beckett privately thought it was an appealing image, unlike Castle, who was obviously at risk of spilling his obscenely alcoholic drink across the table again as he guffawed openly. She had some reservations, though.

"Would you have hurt him?" she had to know. "If he hadn't confessed and was going to walk free?"

She thought about it, carefully, taking her time with the question and looking around the room at the people she had, in some small way, brought here—through her war, her way of doing things. Beckett watched her check on people she clearly knew, size up those she didn't, sweep the room for potential threats almost subconsciously, and approve of the result. Although she couldn't see the person on the other end of that gaze, the detective also noticed her catch the eye of—probably—her partner Spike, and send some sort of message through a single glance.

Beckett didn't know what, exactly; she didn't have the key to that code. But Beckett was pretty sure she recognized the broad strokes of it. She was beginning to understand that that was what she and Castle looked like. It was an interesting thought which she decided to set aside to ignore at a later time.

"No," Buffy said finally. She seemed sorry to say it, and, at the same time, pleased that she'd made the right call for herself and all the other people who looked to her. "But…we wouldn't have saved him."

Beckett thought she understood, and in her peripheral vision, Castle was nodding slightly. But she still raised her eyebrows and gestured for the Slayer to continue.

"He woulda got into trouble again. People like him always do, they can't stop. It's what they know. But," she struggled to explain, "we don't have to act. There aren't enough of us, we can't save everyone, so…sometimes we choose. Even now. This is the Second Age, and it's so, so, so much better…but we're not enough. Maybe…" The Slayer stopped and looked away. Just as Beckett thought she was finished, she added, "When monsters kill each other, it's not our problem."

She kept watching the crowd move and mix and mingle, as if embarrassed either to be saying something she clearly cared about so much or to be doing so in a historic bar currently full of dance music off somebody's iPod and exploding, fizzy, and/or alcoholic drinks. Whatever she saw as she looked around made her change the subject in a hurry. "Um, you still want this place in one kind-of-not-on-fire piece, right?"

"Yes," said Castle emphatically, twisting around in his chair in an attempt to follow her gaze. Futilely. Again. "Why?" he added in tones of dawning dread.

"No reason," she said, insincerely. "I'll be right back, yeah?" She leapt from her chair and vanished impressively quickly.

"Okay, now I'm worried," said Castle. Beckett tried to work out if she should laugh or not, and decided not to. At least, not loudly.

* * *

Buffy actually didn't come back for quite a while. During that time, word apparently went around that the people sitting at _that table there_ were the ones who had found and successfully locked up the man who had killed Steph Amador. This was evident from the string of people who found time away from the party to stop by Castle and Beckett's table to mutter quick thank-yous or disconnected hellos, or bring them another drink each, although they were obviously one-of-a-kind experimental drinks that had mixed especially for them without proper testing. If there had been cake, they would have been brought cake. Ryan and Esposito, up at the bar with Jenny and Lanie, respectively, were getting similar treatment, although they were allowed to mix their own drinks. Montgomery was nowhere to be seen. He had probably gone home once the pop music had come out—as a man with children, he got enough of it at home and had never been a big fan of the genre to begin with.

It would have been kind of a nice feeling, if Castle wasn't worrying about his bar burning down the whole time and Beckett hadn't been struggling not to laugh at him.

The bar didn't burn down. Nothing exploded. No bottles were broken over any heads, which was an especially good thing because there were plenty of bottles to go around, the contents of some of them were worth quite a bit of money, and some of the people in the room could have done instantly fatal damage with a well-placed bottle, not to mention the shards that would have resulted. No one got hopelessly drunk and threw up. Someone changed the tone of the music and someone else changed it to yet another song thirty seconds later. This lasted for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes before the party died down as quickly as it had flared up.

"Got work to do and butts to kick," Leesha told them as she stopped by their table to say goodbye. "See you around." A little later, Perrin blew them both a kiss and departed hand-in-hand with Santiago.

Some people, mostly the ones who hadn't gotten sucked into the impromptu dancing and those who weren't getting carded by the redoubtable Lloyd and Trevor, stayed a little longer, but things had calmed down a lot by then. Martha called a cab for herself and Alexis, kissed her son on the cheek and hugged Beckett, and departed with a faux-elegant wave largely ruined by the sarcastic fanfare of applause from party-leaving passersby.

"I feel like we've made friends for life," Castle said after the dance music had stopped and the blond boys had departed with what he rather thought had been Steph's iPod. That suited his narrative fancy. He made a face halfway between amusement and doubt. Now that the music had stopped and the bar had lost the atmosphere of a raucous party, he was free to think and be serious rather than hold up his 'maestro of fun' reputation. "Or maybe they'll forget all about us by next week."

"I don't know," Beckett admitted. "Steph…well, I guess I didn't know her very well. I didn't know that she liked every kind of music imaginable, or that she worked at a dojo, or that she had so many friends, or what color she'd painted her apartment. I do know loyalty is very important to them. If you can't rely on your friends…" She mirrored Castle's expression of uncertainty. "So maybe they'll remember."

"Slayers are funny people." There was only one person in the room who spoke with that accent, so Beckett didn't have to look up to know that Spike had come over to talk to them. Or, more likely, look for Buffy. She met his gaze and acknowledged him anyway.

"Stubborn as anything," he explained. "They'll ignore a bunch of stuff as long as you're on their side. _You_ fought for them, so they'll tear the world apart for you, you ask 'em now." He leaned on the back of a chair and shrugged, technically a difficult move, but one he made work. "Or maybe I just live with a crazier than usual one."

"I can hear you, you know," Buffy retorted tartly, having finally made her way back from putting out whatever fires, literally or metaphorically, she'd gone to take care of. Or maybe the fire starters had just left with the rest of their friends.

"Can repeat it, if you like."

This, Castle and Beckett had learned, could go on for a while. Beckett decided to head it off at the pass, which she did unintentionally well. "So where do you go from here?"

Whatever she'd said, the reaction was amusing. "_Ka_te!" Buffy wailed. "Don't say that! Not allowed!"

"Um, okay," was the only possible response. "Why?"

"It's a long and embarrassing story," she didn't really explain, "and if I told it, I'd have to go hide in the corner until everyone stopped blushing and looking at the ceiling. Family rule. Anyway…" Buffy reclaimed the missing chair from a table that had been moved off the now-abandoned dance floor and the pair joined Castle and Beckett at their table.

"Now that you've got your killer, the two of us should probably head home," she said. "I bet the world has tried to end while we were gone, so we should maybe go find out how they stopped it."

"Think they've run out of 'vacation' jokes?" Spike wondered rhetorically to her, since Castle and Beckett were trying to figure out exactly what they meant by 'world ending' and finding that they simply didn't have enough data.

"They've had almost two weeks to think of more. So…no. That's a really long time for things to go wrong," Buffy explained to the confused New York detectives. "If it was super important, Willow would have found some way to contact me, but…they can handle a whole lot, they've had practice. We should go see."

"Have you _ever_ had two weeks where nothing happened?" Spike asked her. She thought about it and shook her head.

"Wait—there was this one time…nah. No there wasn't. It was _almost_ two weeks, remember? That time with the…"

Beckett hid a smile in the remains of her drink, less at the backchat between the Slayer and her companion than Castle trying to pump them both for details and getting nowhere. They were clearly having a lot of fun not telling him anything he actually understood.

"So will someone take over for Steph here?" she asked before Castle could explode with curiosity. "I thought it wasn't enough that there were three Slayers for all of New York, and now… As much as I respect Leesha and Perrin, I don't think they can handle it alone."

Buffy accepted the distraction and nodded. "Word gets around," she said. "Someone will want to come here and take over." She scowled faintly. "The people that used to run the Slayers, they left us quite a bit of money, so we can send someone here. Steph's friends will have to choose whether they want to work with the new girl, play on their own for a while, or get out of the game. They'll sort it out."

Beckett's expression at the way she summed things up must have been indescribable, because Spike felt obliged to add, "They've had practice."

The Slayer ignored him with what was obviously also practice. "You miss her," she said to Beckett.

Throughout the case, Beckett had kept herself from thinking about that with the puzzle to solve, the 'story' to finish (as Castle would have put it), and the culprit to catch. When she could think about that, she could avoid really realizing that she had lost another friend to violence. "Yes," she now admitted sadly.

Buffy sighed. "Kate," she said seriously, "I'm sorry. But…we die fighting. It's what we do."

"That's horrible," objected Castle. "How can you live with that?"

"Because this is better," she told him hotly. "We die, we can't change that, but we live longer, too, the Slayers. We don't have _expiration dates_ anymore."

Beckett and Castle weren't to know that, because of their history, Buffy and Spike were very rarely openly affectionate to each other in public. They sniped and they argued and out-and-out fought—and they understood each other, although they creatively _mis_understood each other almost as often. But both detectives were mildly surprised to see him reach out and silently place a hand on her shoulder—maybe as a restraint, maybe as a caress. Maybe both. Whatever it was, she understood, calmed down, and tried to explain.

"Willow and Giles," she said, "my friend who is like my sister, and my teacher, did some research. During the First Age, when there was only one Slayer in the whole world at a time, she was lucky if she managed to live anything more than four years. I," she specified, "have been a Slayer since I was fifteen. I should have died before I graduated from high school, and I knew that. It was—" She caught onto Castle's word. "—horrible. We can work together now, we can do better. Look at what we did here. You two and us and Leesha and Perrin…and Steph, she wasn't alone and that's all that matters. She didn't die alone, and she knew it…"

Buffy seemed to have lost her train of thought. Everyone stopped and thought about what she'd said. "We all die fighting," she settled on after a moment. "But—sometimes, it doesn't suck."

"And that's it?" Beckett wanted to know, a little harshly. Maybe they accepted death—hell, she was a homicide cop, she lived with the death of others every day—but it seemed like a pretty unforgiving philosophy. "That's how you manage? …Does it help?"

She smiled at Beckett, a shade sadly, and rose from her chair. "Sometimes," the Slayer said simply, which seemed to close the conversation for her, because she changed the subject. "We should probably go home," she repeated to Spike. "You gonna drive?"

"You _ever_ gonna drive?" he retorted. "She hates driving," the vampire added over her head to Beckett and Castle.

"I suck at driving, it's not the same. Hey, wait a second, did I just—" Bickering with Spike and holding a conversation with someone else simultaneously was an old habit for Buffy, so she added to the detectives, who had also stood up and moved to escort them to the door, "Whoever ends up here, we'll tell her you're good people. So if someone drops by…"

"We'll keep an eye out for her," Beckett agreed.

"And if _you_ come back—" added Castle.

Steph's case was closed and her wake was over, and if the smile was any indication, Buffy at least was moving on. "This was fun. Let's not do it again sometime, okay?" She reached out to Beckett, who took her hand willingly, and then had to repeat the gesture with Castle.

"Not a ghost," the Slayer commented to no one in particular, presumably referring to Castle. "Always good." She laughed at the looks on their faces, stepped back, made a mocking little bow, and slipped out through the door where Spike was waiting for her. Before following her, he looked the pair of detectives over, obviously saw something funny, and essayed a sarcastic little wave of his own.

And then they were gone. Except that as the door swung closed Beckett and Castle could clearly hear them laughing together.

"Well, that was interesting," Castle managed, deciding that understatement was the better part of valor.

He looked around the bar. Nothing was on fire and nothing seemed to be broken—always good, to borrow Buffy's parting words. Lloyd and Trevor weren't giving him death glares for bringing a private party in and then giving them free rein to mix their own drinks. He was willing to bet clean-up duty that they'd had the sheer common sense to hide the good stuff. At some point, Ryan, Jenny, Esposito, and Lanie had left, and there were some actual Old Haunt patrons drifting in for a late drink. They seemed undeterred by the detritus from the earlier party, which was vanishing at an incredible rate as Lloyd and Trevor worked their magic.

More importantly…Beckett was smiling, another thing that was always good. True, sometimes 'smiling' meant 'I have played a prank on you in conspiracy with Ryan and Esposito and made the espresso machine explode on you', but no actual harm had come of that, and she was even more gorgeous than usual when she laughed. It balanced out. They'd proved once again that they were a good team, even though they'd had some unconventional help from supernatural and, well, anti-supernatural forces.

"Good party, Castle," she congratulated him playfully, picking up her empty glass and tipping it at him in a parody of a toast before taking it and the remains of her other drink over to the bar for Lloyd and Trevor.

When she returned, he said with mock courtesy and a slightly more courtly attempt at a bow, "May I escort you to your car, Detective Beckett?"

"Why, Mr. Castle, you may," she deadpanned right back at him, and he indicated the obvious path to the door with an overdramatic swish of his hand.

Smirking at him—but in a good way—she took his arm and they headed towards the exit—which opened before them unexpectedly.

So much for leaving; it was Buffy again.

"Forgot to say," she said, as if she'd just looked away for a minute. "What I said, about dying in battle sometimes not sucking all that much?"

"I remember," Beckett agreed, despite her surprise.

"More important," the Slayer specified. "Winning? Sucks less."

She didn't wait for a response, stepping back and closing the door again. Even through the door of the Old Haunt, Castle and Beckett could clearly hear the sound of her footsteps running up the stairs leading to the street until, presumably, she reached it and vanished into the city.

"That," said Castle, grinning, "managed to be utterly true while being so far from deep it's practically a kiddie pool."

Beckett laughed, although whether it was at him or Buffy's last-minute correction he wasn't sure. "I love these people," she said, not clearing the issue up any. "Come on, Castle, let's go. We won this one."

This one, he thought as they headed back to their homes and their lives and the work that they shared. And between the two of them and enough good friends, maybe they'd manage to win the ones that mattered most.

Together. For as long as they could.

_END_

* * *

**Author's Note:** The following is a 'making-of' segment, which I tossed in there because I watch a lot of _Doctor Who_, and the new series always does a 'making of' after each episode, and I love them. If you are interested, go ahead and read. If not, which I understand you may not be, **I ask most sincerely that you take this opportunity to review this story**. This is the last chapter and your last chance—even 'good story and I liked it' will make the work that has been the background to the last six months of my life worthwhile. I'd love to hear from you…what you liked, what worked, what made you laugh, anything you think I missed…although please don't tell me that I don't have the true Buffy dialect down. I know. She's hard for me to write; my internal spell-check won't let me pin her voice down. I think in semicolons even when I'm exhausted—the spell-check won't go away.

* * *

AND NOW FOR…

**Things You Never Knew You Wanted To Know: An Utterly Superfluous Making-Of Section**

_What made you cross these two series over?_ One week last year, I couldn't decide which series to watch, so decided to watch both of them in alternating episodes. That worked nicely until characters started showing up together in my dreams and I couldn't get them to leave.

_How much did you plan in advance?_ Whodunit. Whydunit. Howdunit. Character names. The basic shape of the plot, which held until four of the main characters dug in their heels and did their own thing for three chapters that I hadn't planned on. In retrospect, there's also a fair dose in here of _Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog_, which I suppose was inevitable at the intersection of Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion, in that a villain character tries to impress a girl and it all goes Horribly Wrong.

_Why episode titles as chapter titles?_ Several reasons. One: They're pre-selected for suitability (read: I am lazy). Two: In tribute to my grandmaster fanfiction-writer friend SonOfTed; he did the same thing for several of his Star Trek epics, which you should read. Three: When I started writing Chapter One, I'd just re-watched the BtVS episode "Dead Things" and couldn't think of any other more appropriate titles. I typed it at the top of my page as a placeholder and it stuck.

_Is there a real Stockbridge?_ Yes. And no. There is a real English town called Stockbridge that I know nothing about. There is also a fictional English town called Stockbridge often visited by the comic strip series of _Doctor Who Magazine_. In there, as in here, it's a place where much weirdness happens on a regular basis. Buffy and her crew should fit right in, while affording me the amusing possibility of one or more of the various incarnations of the Doctor tripping over them one of these days.

_Do any of your characters' names mean anything relevant?_ No. I like my original characters to have existences both before and after the story (unless they die) and name them as if these pages weren't the be-all and end-all of their lives. I did shorten 'Leesha' from the Alicia I'd called her to begin with because anything over two syllables takes too long to yell at a Slayer in a crisis. Radinka is a real name. It's obscure and Russian. Jessamine is also a real name, obscure but not Russian. The only person who was deliberately named for her character traits is Holly, and I didn't realize I'd probably named her for Holly Short (from the _Artemis Fowl_ series) until I'd already posted the chapter. And I tend to steal last names and the first names of background characters from the incredibly vast reservoir of _Doctor Who_ New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures authors. Why? Frighteningly large numbers of those books sit about six feet from where I write.

_Why the forgotten abandoned (probably not actually demon-infested) subway tunnels of Manhattan?_ Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, the authors of the fantastic thriller _Reliquary_ and many other equally fantastic books, are two of my favorite authors. If Michael Crichton and Stephen King had ever written together, that book would have read the way these two write. If this sounds good to you, start with _Relic_. _Reliquary_ is the sequel and won't make any sense unless you've read _Relic_. Then read everything else they've ever written. You want to. You do.

_So what is Spike wrong about in Chapter Ten?_ If you don't know that, you obviously haven't seen "Chosen" recently. The running joke they have going is a little bit "Princess Bride", in which 'as you wish' does not mean what you think it means—two "Princess Bride" jokes in one!

_How does this story compare to the rest of your writing?_ I always think my most recent story is my best, although I still hold a soft spot for "Fortunes and War" (_Doctor Who_) and parts of my "Lost Boys" collection (_Death Note_). "A Time for Pizza", probably the only romance-free Inu-Yasha/Yu Yu Hakusho crossover out there, stands up well. But "Paint the Town Red" was certainly new ground for me (never before written a mystery, never before written for "Buffy", never before written for "Castle"). It stands as my most-followed and second-longest story—my _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ fanfiction _Free Enterprise_ is almost 83,000 words long, but took me a year and a half.

_More forthcoming?_ More fanfiction? Yes. _Doctor Who_ stories and possibly random _Avengers_ stuff loom on my horizon. More for "Buffy" or "Castle"? Maybe. More crossover between the two? Don't hold your breath any.

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**THANKS FOR READING! –Le'letha **


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